Movie/Book

Director:    Susanne Bier Writer:  Eric Heisserer, Josh Malerman Bird Box  can be viewed as one of the most intelligent movies in the current climate. It is a cleverly disguised science fiction film where art imitates life. The viewer is brought along a metaphorical path submerged into the depths of ignorance as forced behavior. Bird Box  sensitively tackles the question of mental health in society. It delves into how it is perceived from those directly affected, to those who view it and how those attitudes are communicated. The movie suggests a split in society, an ‘us and them’ situation. And one wonders whether the film would have been such a roaring success if these themes had been addressed more directly within its narrative. Through clever symbolism, director Susanne Bier ( The Night Manager ) subtly gets her point across. In  Bird Box , we are told an unseen force has the power to cause people who stare towards it to become unbalanced...

Author:   Leo Tolstoy Books Name :   Anna Karenina Anna Karenina is set in nineteenth-century Russia, exploring relationships, death and controversy between tradition and freethinking. A crucial theme in Leo Tolstoy’s works is adultery. In Moscow, Anna Karenina meets the charming Vronsky, and together they indulge in an affair despite her husband Karenin. One might argue that Anna is selfish in her passionate romance, having to choose between Vronsky and her young son. Nevertheless, I can’t help but pity her desperate actions as she is trapped in a marriage full of emotionless conventionality. Alongside this intense relationship, there are many more characters cleverly intertwined, which gives the reader a deep insight into different aspects of the time. While Anna is hopelessly trying to keep Vronsky a secret, Levin travels on a philosophical journey, Kitty starts broken-hearted, Dolly struggles to keep the Oblonsky family together and Karenin is lost. The...

Director:   Andrei Tarkovsky Writer:  Aleksandr Misharin,  Andrei Tarkovsky The film is virtually a testament to Tarkovsky’s insistence that the film medium transcends the limitations typical of textual narratives and engages the viewer on a direct existentially experiential level.  However, the film’s loose, nonlinear structure also makes it difficult to follow for the average viewer.  Many people only come to appreciate  The Mirror  after several repeated viewings.  The subject matter of the film concerns the memories and reflections of a 40-year-old man, Alexei, who has been diagnosed with a terminal health condition. These are told in the form of various separate vignettes from the man’s childhood as well as from his present circumstances, and the sequences jump back and forth in time without much motivation or explanation. S omewhat like the films created by Tarkovsky’s friend  Sergei Parajanov , it is up to the viewer...

Amok A doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his medical duty to help and his own mixed emotions; a middle-aged maidservant whose devotion to her master leads her to commit a terrible act; a hotel waiter whose love for an unapproachable aristocratic beauty culminates in an almost lyrical death and a prisoner-of-war longing to be home again in Russia. In these four stories, Stefan Zweig shows his gift for the acute analysis of emotional dilemmas. His four tragic and moving cameos of the human condition are played out against cosmopolitan and colonial backgrounds in the first half of the twentieth century. Resources Prepared by Ayhan Can Koç

Could a nightmare be used as a murder weapon? That’s the provocative question confronting Gurney in the thrilling new installment in this series of international bestsellers. The former NYPD star homicide detective is called upon to solve a baffling puzzle: Four people who live in different parts of the country and who seem to have little in common, report having had the same dream—a terrifying nightmare involving a bloody dagger with a carved wolf’s head on the handle. All four are subsequently found with their wrists cut — apparent suicides — and the weapon used in each case was a wolf’s head dagger. Police zero in quickly on Richard Hammond, a controversial psychologist who conducts hypnotherapy sessions at a spooky old Adirondack inn called Wolf Lake Lodge. It seems that each of the victims had gone there to meet with Hammond shortly before turning up dead. Troubled by odd holes in the official approach to the case, Gurney begins his own investigation — an action that puts h...

Director:Aisling Walsh Writer:J.B Priestley,Helen Edmundson Stars:Sophie Rundle,David Thewlis,Miranda Richardson,Ken Stott An Inspector Calls  is a 2015 British  thriller   television film. The film is set in 1912, and follows the events of a single evening on which the wealthy Birling family is holding a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of their daughter, Sheila. The festivities are then interrupted by a visit from what is taken to be a policeman, Inspector Goole, who is investigating the recent suicide of a local young woman. Goole’s interrogations of each member of the dinner party make it clear that all of them have contributed to the tragedy through individually unjust, selfish or exploitative behavior. [6]  The Inspector leaves the subdued group with a warning that human beings have shared responsibility for each other and that this lesson will soon be taught "in fire and blood and anguish" - an apparent reference to the outbreak of Wo...

The Great Hack It is about the Trump campaign, the Leave.EU campaign and many other reckless electoral adventures all over the world and their connection with Cambridge Analytica, the British data research company that cunningly harvested information from millions of Facebook users and their friends via an innocuous-seeming “personality” questionnaire. They put this gigantic database to lucrative work with machine-tooled marketing campaigns for Trump and the Brexiters; after the company declared bankruptcy, its documentation may never come to light. At the centre of the film is Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who blows the whistle on her employers’ connections, including those with the Bad Boys of Brexit, whose bad-tempered éminence grise Arron Banks is now trying to silence Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr – as well as this film – with legal threats. We are aware of these issues in the first place only because of the magnificently tough in...

  Experience our planet's natural beauty and examine how climate change impacts all living creatures in this ambitious documentary of spectacular scope.There is a 8 chapter in this documentary. One Planet Witness the planet's breathtaking diversity -- from seabirds carpet-bombing the ocean to wildebeests eluding the wild dogs of the Serengeti. Frozen Worlds On the unforgiving frontier of climate change, polar bears, walruses, seals and penguins find their icy Edens in peril. Jungles Jungles and rainforests are home to an incredible variety of species like preening birds, intelligent orangutans and remarkably ambitious ants. Coastal Seas From fearsome sharks to lowly urchins, 90 percent of marine creatures live in coastal waters. Protecting these habitats is a battle humanity must win. From Deserts to Grasslands Cameras follow desert elephants seeking sustenance, bison roaming North American grasslands and caterpillars living the good life un...

In this heartbreaking Turkish novel based on the real-life sinking of a refugee ship during World War II, an elderly professor leaves America to revisit the city where he last glimpsed his beloved wife. Istanbul, 2001. Maya Duran is a single mother struggling to balance a demanding job at Istanbul University with the challenges of raising a teenage son. Her worries increase when she is tasked with looking after the enigmatic Maximilian Wagner, an elderly German-born Harvard professor visiting the city at the university's invitation. Although he is distant at first, Maya gradually learns of the tragic circumstances that brought him to Istanbul sixty years before, and the dark realities that continue to haunt him. Inspired by the 1942 Struma disaster, in which nearly 800 Jewish refugees perished after the ship carrying them to Palestine was torpedoed off the coast of Turkey, Serenade for Nadia is both a poignant love story and a gripping testament to the power of hu...

Author:  Yusuf Atılgan Books Name :   Motherland Hotel  The story follows Zebercet, a middle-aged loner who runs a small rundown hotel near a train station in İzmir, inherited from his grandfather. Visitors to the hotel include villagers, tobacco farmers, party delegates, dentists, newly enlisted soldiers, marketplace vendors, livestock dealers, teachers, students, lawyers, prostitutes, touring actors, and one-night couples. Zebercet is “serious and patient” but alienated from society, having no friends and making no visits to the restaurant or cinema. His life follows a mundane daily pattern, structured by daily administrative tasks and routine, passionless sexual liaisons with the hotel maid.  This tedious life is dramatically interrupted by the one-night stay of an alluring woman visiting from the capital, referred to only as “the woman off the Ankara train.” When she leaves in the morning she tells him that she is visiting relatives in the coun...

Author:   Hakan Günday Books Name : More T his disturbing new novel by Hakan Gunday, one of Turkey’s leading young writers, is like a visit to a Hieronymus Bosch hell: terrifying scenes of suffering, starvation, sadism, depravity and the agonies associated with combat zones. “More” recounts the story of a boy named Gaza who works with his father, a human trafficker, and it conveys the suffering of refugees and migrants as they try to make their way from war-torn countries like Afghanistan and Syria through Turkey and eventually on to Greece and the wider world (that is, if they survive a cascade of perils, one more awful than the next). It is also the narrator’s coming-of-age story, starting at 9 — a dark fable that traces the metamorphosis of a bright schoolboy into an appalling monster.   The importance of this novel — which won the French Prix Médicis Étranger award — lies in its horrific portrayals of refugees fleeing desperate situations, sometimes leavi...