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Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz taps into his country’s zeitgeist with contemporary drama Life (Hayat), starring Miray Daner as a young woman who runs away to Istanbul to escape an arranged marriage but still struggles to break free of male domination.

Her jilted fiancé Riza (Burak Dakak) ruminates on the rejection and heads to the city in a bid to track her down. Their paths criss-cross, but it is not certain they ever will connect.

“The whole story began 35 years ago during an Anatolian trip to a small border town, when I had a 15-minute interaction with a young woman who was managing something like a bodega,” Demirkubuz told a Deadline Contenders International panel.

“This is the power of cinema,” he added. “That little interaction I had with her grew into the story you just mentioned — a young woman trying to live out her dreams in a society dominated by...

Just as the Oscar Best Picture race remains wide open as 2024 comes to an end, there’s a similar sense of excitement mounting about the breadth and range of films competing for Best International Feature Film. The submissions process found 85 of the 89 films presented eligible, but the real work starts now, in terms of whittling those down first to a shortlist of 15 and then to the final five.

Perhaps more so than in recent years, the diversity is eye-popping, ranging from action thrillers and personal dramas to intimate documentaries. The cross-section is well represented at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International showcase, which kicks off today beginning at 9 a.m. Pt.

Click here to launch the livestream.

As ever, this year’s lineup offers a snapshot of film festival highlights, taking us on a whistle-stop tour of the big five — Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice and Toronto — with titles that made an impact at events in Warsaw,...

At the start of Turkish auteur Zeki Demirkubuz’s long-awaited and frustratingly miscalculated “Life” — the filmmaker’s first movie in seven years, now serving as Turkey’s international feature submission to the Academy Awards —a young woman named Hicran flees the claws of an impending arranged marriage and goes into hiding.

We learn as much, not from Hicran at first, but from the men in her orbit, as the likes of her embarrassed dad and distraught former fiancé drop Hicran’s name in conversations and ponder the circumstances surrounding her mysterious flight. Quickly, it feels pointed to keep hearing the word “Hicran,” a common-enough female name in Turkey (where this critic is from) that roughly translates as “longing,” or rather, the intense pain one feels out of longing. That’s because it’s anything but an accidental name choice here, as everyone in “Life” seems to be yearning for something or someone.