Vizontele

Penned by Yılmaz Erdoğan and co-helmed with Ömer Faruk Sorak, the comedy-drama Vizontele carries the Beşiktaş Cultural Center's stamp and ranked among the most attended homegrown pictures of its release window. The plot draws on Erdoğan's own boyhood memory of a television set finally reaching his home region, though shooting itself took place in a different district near Van because of location constraints.

Set in the mid-1970s, it follows the arrival of a television set into an isolated settlement barely connected to the outside world. When officials sent to install the receiver fail to get it working, the local mayor turns to a young man in town regarded as odd but genuinely skilled with electronics. The hunt for a signal supplies plenty of comic mishaps, complicated further by a cinema-hall owner protecting his business and by tension between devout and secular townsfolk, until the very first broadcast news—that a soldier has died—turns the mood suddenly somber.

The director's fellow cast members, largely drawn from the same theatre troupe, include Demet Akbağ, Altan Erkekli, Cem Yılmaz, Zeynep Tokuş, Şafak Sezer, Tolga Çevik, and Serhat Özcan. The picture picked up three prizes at a national festival, and its story world was later carried forward with a sequel released years afterward.