Crime and Punishment at Istanbul Film Festival

By SUSANNE GUSTEN

ISTANBUL — What do so-called honor killings and coups d’état have in common?

The answer, according to Adem Sozuer, dean of law at Istanbul University, is love — the love the perpetrators profess for their victims.

“They love them, and they kill them,” Mr. Sozuer told a roomful of reporters, film critics and legal scholars in Istanbul last week.

“We hear a lot about fathers’ killing their beloved daughters in the name of honor and morals, for having been kidnapped or raped,” Mr. Sozuer said. “We see the same sick mind-set in the leaders of coups d’état and oppressive regimes: They love their countries and societies, but the coups they stage in the name of love and protection bring death and torture and loss to their peoples.”

Mr. Sozuer offered the analogy as an example of the “different perspectives” on coups and other crimes that organizers of the Crime and Punishment Film Festival hope to gain by juxtaposing artistic and academic viewpoints of the quest for justice.

The festival, which opens in Istanbul on Friday, will screen about 100 films from 40 countries dealing with all kinds of crimes and punishments, but focusing especially on coups d’état, the inaugural year’s main festival theme.

It is a theme with a special resonance in Turkey, which has seen four elected governments pushed out by the military since 1960 and has just started to overcome taboos surrounding that history.

A year ago, Turks voted in a referendum to abolish legal protections for generals involved in the violent coup of 1980. The coup leader, the retired general and former president Kenan Evren, has since been questioned by state prosecutors.

The focus of the Istanbul festival is also significant for those nations of the region facing the question of how to deal with crimes committed by dictatorial regimes toppled in the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring this year. Several filmmakers and academics from the Middle East are expected in Istanbul for the festival.

The distinguishing feature of the Crime and Punishment Festival are the legal panels, presentations and debates accompanying the screenings that will try to cross-pollinate artistic and academic exploration of the concept of justice.

Along with directors, producers, writers and actors, dozens of prominent legal scholars from around the world have been invited to Istanbul to draw on the insights and inspirations offered by the cinema.

“We believe cinematic art can be an effective vehicle to open up discussion of criminal law reform and its problems to society,” said Mr. Sozuer, the director of the festival, which is sponsored by Istanbul University’s law faculty and the Istanbul district of Basaksehir. “Criminal law reform should not be left to academics and Parliament alone — all of society has a responsibility here. We all discuss crime and punishment and justice every day, in society, among individuals and in the media. With this festival, we want to create a more effective forum of debate for society on a topic that is of such common interest.”

The festival opens with a screening of “17 Hours” by the Spanish director Chema de la Peña, a 2011 thriller about the attempted coup in which a group of soldiers tried to wrest back control of newly democratic Spain from Parliament in February 1981.

Other films in the main category of the festival, which runs through Sept. 30, include Mohammadreza Farzad’s documentary of the massacre of innocent citizens during the Iranian revolution of 1979 and a Honduran documentary of the popular resistance against the attempted coup in that country in 2009, as well as documentaries from Myanmar, Chile, and Colombia and feature films from the Philippines, Argentina and Rwanda.

Turkish films figure prominently in the “coup” category, with 4 recent feature films, 2 documentaries and 2 short films among the 20 contenders in that category.

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via Crime and Punishment at Istanbul Film Festival – NYTimes.com.