Symbioz Boards 'Sevda' Istanbul Real Estate Drama — SkimNews
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- Symbioz Films has boarded sales on "Sevda," Swiss-Turkish director Ufuk Emiroglu's debut fiction feature, and unveiled a trailer.
- The film world premiered at the Zurich Film Festival in September and follows protagonist Sevda, a real estate developer whose major Istanbul development deal halts over an old Ottoman cemetery on the earmarked site and an elderly caretaker who refuses to leave.
- Ercan Kesal, actor in "Once Upon A Time In Anatolia," co-wrote the screenplay with Emiroglu and also appears in the cast.
- "Sevda" is a Swiss-Turkish-Belgian co-production, produced by Paris-based Nadia Turincev and Omar El Kadi alongside Geneva's Akka Films (Nicolas Wadimoff and Philippe Coeytaux), Brussels's Stenola Production (Eva Kuperman and Anton Iffland Stettner), and Istanbul's Bir Film (Ersan Congar and Cihan Aslı Filiz).
- Emiroglu's prior credit is the 2013 Locarno-selected documentary "My Father, the Revolution and Me," about her father's revolutionary communist past, exile and personal struggles.
- Symbioz Films, launched in May by Aleksandar Govedarica as a Europe-based all-rights sales and production outfit, also handles Slovenia's "Everything That's Wrong With You" and "This is not an Apple" about Palestinian siblings in a gang-infested Oslo suburb.
Why it matters: For Symbioz Films, launched in May by Aleksandar Govedarica, attaching the Zurich-premiered debut "Sevda" from Ufuk Emiroglu anchors the nascent outfit's early market slate. The film's premise — a gentrifier confronting her own buried family history on a contested Ottoman cemetery site — gives European art-house buyers a topical, locally rooted drama to acquire.
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