Debate is underway in Turkey’s film community over similarities between the award-winning 2019 Turkish feature “Passed by Censor” and Elvira Lind’s “The Letter Room,” which is nominated for the Best Live Action Short Oscar. Both films revolve around similar lead characters: prison guards tasked with scanning inmates’ mail for objectionable content. Now the Turkish filmmaking team has lawyered up and wants to negotiate with their American counterparts.
Financed by Topic, the streaming service owned by First Look Media, “The Letter Room” stars Lind’s husband Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawkat. After debuting at Hollyshorts in November 2020, it appeared on the Oscars shortlist in February; several more distribution deals followed.
On April 11, a column by film critic Vecdi Sayar of the Turkish newspaper BirGün cited the similarities between “Passed by Censor” and “The Letter Room” as the latest example of a Turkish film that hasn’t gotten its due for influencing other productions.
Financed by Topic, the streaming service owned by First Look Media, “The Letter Room” stars Lind’s husband Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawkat. After debuting at Hollyshorts in November 2020, it appeared on the Oscars shortlist in February; several more distribution deals followed.
On April 11, a column by film critic Vecdi Sayar of the Turkish newspaper BirGün cited the similarities between “Passed by Censor” and “The Letter Room” as the latest example of a Turkish film that hasn’t gotten its due for influencing other productions.
- 4/24/2021
- by Chris Lindahl
- Indiewire
In Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation,” Gene Hackman played a surveillance expert who insists that curiosity is beyond the purview of his job, only to become obsessed with the mystery contained in a recorded conversation. A similar paradox informs Serhat Karaaslan’s debut feature “Passed by Censor,” in which a Turkish prison officer who fancies himself a writer fixates on the family of one of his inmates after he starts writing a fictionalized story about them. Censorship vs. creativity, paranoid fantasy vs. wishful thinking, the point where privacy ends and secrecy begins — all these heady elements simmer away against the backdrop of an inherently repressive institution in an increasingly authoritarian society. With parts like these, it’s little wonder that Karaaslan’s film adds up to a bit less than their sum.
His humdrum days spent painstakingly erasing potentially bothersome phrases from inmates’ letters, prison censor Zakir (Berkay Ates...
His humdrum days spent painstakingly erasing potentially bothersome phrases from inmates’ letters, prison censor Zakir (Berkay Ates...
- 7/26/2019
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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