The winner of the “Golden Bear” at the Berlin Film Festival, Semih Kaplanoğlu, is this year’s laureate of the Special Camera 300 for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinematic Art.

Kaplanoğlu is one of the most successful and influential directors in Turkish cinema, having received 28 international awards and 10 nominations worldwide. He made his debut in 2001 with “Away from Home”, which earned him the Best Director Award at the Singapore Film Festival. In 2005, his second feature film, “Angel’s Fall”, had its world premiere at the Berlinale Forum and won the Best Film Award in Nantes, while his third feature film “Egg”, which premiered in 2007 at the Cannes Film Festival, won 30 awards. “Egg” was the first part of the “Yusuf Trilogy” that made Semih Kaplanoğlu into a world famous director. In 2008, the film “Milk” premiered in the Official Competition at the Venice Film Festival and proceeded to be screened at a number of other festivals around the world bringing him several international awards, including the FIPRESCI Prize at the Istanbul Film Festival.

For “Honey”, the third part of the “Yusuf Trilogy”, he received the “Golden Bear” at the 60 th edition of the Berlin Film Festival.
His films are characterized by metaphysical themes and a recognizable authorship in cinema art.

-Before I started making films, I was dedicated to poetry, and it was poetry that trained me. As you know, in poetry a lot needs to be said in very few words. This is the very the nature of the discipline, and this is the reason it also influenced my perception, or my actions, Kaplanoğlu said in an interview in 2017, during his visit to Skopje.

He believes that “real time should be adjusted to cinematic time”. 

“I want to convey the feeling of real time in cinema, because in everyday life we very rarely feel real time,” the author said in the same interview.

He has sat on the juries at the Cannes Film Festival, the European Film Academy, and the Asia-Pacific Screen Academy. In addition to cinema as his main preoccupation, Semih Kaplanoğlu was also writing articles between 1987 and 2003 that were published in periodicals dedicated to the arts, while between 1996 and 2000 he had a column in the daily newspaper “Radikal”.

He chose the 2017 film “Grain” to be screened in his honour at this year’s edition of the ICFF “Manaki Brothers”. The 35mm black-and-white film is a co-production between Turkey, Germany, France, Sweden and Qatar, with Jean-Marc Barr, Hermine Bravo, Grigoriy Dobrygin and Cristina Flutur, and was made over the course of five years. “Grain” won the Best Film Award at the 30 th Tokyo Film Festival.

In 2018, he began working on the “Commitment Trilogy”. 2019’s “Commitment Hasan” was nominated for an Oscar in Turkey, being the director’s first digital film. In 2020, he finished filming “Commitment Hasan” just before the outburst of the COVID pandemic, and is currently working on the final instalment of the trilogy, “Commitment Fikret,” which is an adaptation of the novel “A Mind at Peace” by the renowned Turkish author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.