Ahmet Toklu

Ahmet Toklu was born in Istanbul in 1987. He graduated from Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University Cinema-Television Department in 2011. With his scripts "Confrontation" (2009) and "The Return of Eylül" (2011) he won two awards for the "Best of Short Film Screenplay” at the The Short Film Scenario competitions, co-organized by the Türksak Foundation and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. With his short film NURSING HOME (2015) he competed in many festivals including Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival and Akbank Short Film Festival. Since 2009 he has been working as an assistant director in various television series and film projects. Ahmet is also one of the founders of Film Arası (one of the leading cinema magazines in Turkey) and the author of the book A Tired Warrior; Halit Refiğ, about the Turkish director Halit Refiğ.

Director’s statement
“The famous Russian poet and scriptwriter Vilademir Mayakovski says "If you are going to tell a story, tell the story of your own street first". I wanted to focus on the streets where I grew up and on my childhood memories in my first feature-length screenplay. [...] My childhood passed in a slum district in Umraniye. I was in a group of friends from different regions of the country and from different cultures, but melting in the same pot. Sites were starting to rise in our neighborhood where the urban transformation had just begun.
[...] At that time, when I started to face the facts of life, the most important event that affected me was experiencing the class difference among the children in the street at the basketball game. In those years, we tried to overcome the despair caused by inequality through the friendship and solidarity between us. I built the sub-texts which shaped the story and based the story on these feelings. I tried to create a fiction universe out of real human stories.”