A Sort of Love

Synopsis

For a year filmmaker Dirk Schäfer accompanied thirty‐year‐old Nevzat through his disordered life. Nevzat, who grew up in the bosom of a Kurdish tribe at Turkey’s border to Iran, had been forced into a marriage at the age of fifteen in order to pacify a smoldering blood feud with another clan. Yet the marriage was never consummated and again and again Nevzat chose to stay away from village life by hiring himself out as a construction worker in the mega‐metropolis Istanbul, a job that almost claimed his life. All his life Nevzat has been forced to use his wits to forge his way and has had a hard time planning a future. Starting as an observational documentary, “A Sort of Love” becomes the source and mirror of an unusual friendship.

Director Biography

Born in Gelnhausen (Germany) in 1961, Dirk Schäfer was trained as a film editor in Munich and has been directing and producing fiction and non-fiction films since 1989. He studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and attended the Andrzej Wajda Film School in Warsaw in the EKRAN program. His films have been shown at international festivals like Berlin, San Sebastian, New York, Sydney and Leipzig. Besides his work as a filmmaker Schäfer has been a film instructor at Istanbul Bilgi University.