ALL THEY KNOW ABOUT LOVE
Melik Kuru
Bal Film
An emotionally underdeveloped translator enjoys the borderline intimate relationship with his mother. Starting at a tutoring job, one of his young students becomes his strongest obstacle and most reliable guide on this journey.
MEHMED, a well-educated young adult, enjoys the mutually overdependent life with his mother SEVDA. His translation works are far from satisfying. He starts to work as a tutor in a private institution of French language where he realizes his flashy background isn’t enough to overcome the predicaments of this new professional life. Things take a dramatic turn when a student named DURU, a noncompliant young woman with a daring keenness, interrupts his secluded private life. As these two young people get drawn to each other, Mehmed’s emotional world that used to be defined by his symbiotic yet castrated relationship with his mother, starts to reveal itself. Duru, using the means of his privileged socio-economic class when needed, will make a breach in this dangerously intimate mother-son affection, opening a new ground for painful confrontations. As the relations between these three people get more undefined with each new day, some inevitable gains and losses are on the horizon.
MELIK KURU / IMDB
MELIK KURU (Istanbul, 1989) had his formative years at Galatasaray High School, a long-standing francophone school located in the cultural heart of Istanbul. In 2016, he was awarded with prestigious Mithat Alam Film Foundation’s Grant and moved to New York to pursue his MFA in Directing and Screenwriting at Columbia University where he wrote, directed, produced and edited various short films. The short film KIDS, he wrote and directed, had its premiere at the 10th Oaxaca International Film Festival. His Columbia thesis short film, WE ARE A FAMILY, had its national premiere at Antalya International Film Festival in 2020, also screening at Oscar-qualified 22, Izmir Short Film Festival and being awarded with notable Jury Selects and Audience Award at Columbia University Film Festival. In addition to his directorial work, the feature film he edited BETWEEN TWO DAWNS (directed by Selman Nacar) screened and received awards at prominent film festivals such as San Sebastian, Torino, Seattle and Arras. He recently moved back to Istanbul and currently works on his feature directing debut, ALL THEY KNOW ABOUT LOVE. As the project has moved to funding stage, it participated in international co-production markets such as Meetings on The Bridge and Cinelink in 2022.
Director’s statement
I envision ALL THEY KNOW ABOUT LOVE to be a visceral, intellectually stimulating and emotionally maximal film where my focus will be the deconstruction of some universal archetypes in a contemporary Turkish socio-economic context: a narcissistic overgrown child who has never left his mother’s place, a domineering, yet insecure woman who has built her identity solely on motherhood, and a young woman who has never learned to set boundaries while exhausting her class privileges and lust for life. Sticking on MEHMED’s perspective while he becomes the bridge between the isolated, intimate, modest mother’s house and the upper-class, hierarchical, socially vibrating French institution, the narrative structure of the film uses the codes of romantic dramas, only to subvert them and play with the expectations of audience.
The camera will create a visual elaboration to distinguish the dynamics between characters and the psychological steps they take into emancipation. In Mehmed and SEVDA’s house, a space of mundane routine and rituals of thirty years, the camera will be reserved, plain and patient to bring an observational quality into this metaphorical womb. The school, on the contrary, will signal emotional unpredictability, kinetic abundance and physical collision. It will suggest a tactile, fragmented and energetic experience to underline specifically what is unspoken between Mehmed and DURU, beneath their sometimes-elevated dialogues.
Growing up in a newly urban family desperately clinging on rural traditions, the notions of “manchild” or “helicopter mother” feel sadly familiar to me. This is why I would like to suggest that love, in forms of maternal intimacy, eruptive desire or individual maturity, has a catalytic function of progression in this film. In a country that has been crippled by patriarchal conservatism and authoritarianism, it becomes only intuitive to use such an available word to inquire the entangled relationship between governance, performance and gender roles.
IREM AKBAL / IMDB
IREM AKBAL graduated from Koç University Law and Philosophy Departments with a double major. She worked with several independent theater companies in her college years. Co-founded in 2017, she has been working as producer at Istanbul-based theater company Tiyatro BeReZe. Focusing on narrative filmmaking ever since, Akbal produced various fiction and non-fiction films among which her first feature film, the queer documentary SCENES I IMAGINE (2020), has screened in notable film festivals such as Antalya IFF, Istanbul IFF, Documentarist Istanbul. In 2021, Akbal joined Liman Films of Nadir Öperli, a Turkish film production house that has produced many critically acclaimed Turkish independent films in the last decade. She works as associate producer in latest Liman Film titles such as Ahmet Necdet Cupur’s feature length documentary LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (2021) and Emin Alper’s latest film BURNING DAYS which premiered at Un Certain Regard in Cannes Film Festival 2022. In 2021, She started her Istanbul-based creative production house, Bal Film. In addition to her production work, Akbal continues to practice her legal consultancy work in fields of intellectual property and copyright law.
Producer's statement:
We have been friends with Melik since our college years. When he broached the idea, what made this story magnetising for me, was his perfectionist ambition on finding the most tameless yet undeniable moments and realities in intimate relationships. Unfolding in a pain similar to the bone and muscle pain that one feels during adolescence, the film follows its three characters’ journey from ignorance to experience, incapacity to governance and insecurity to openness. A tangled coming of age story which gives the audience a bittersweet glimmer of hope at the end, I believe that simplicity in the plot backed against the complexity of the characters offers a delicately unique experience, for both domestic and international audiences.
As a female producer, I am also glad to be part of a story where an incompetent man does not get red carpet treatment and the “ladies around him” are not portrayed as the “true enemies behind.” It’s not so easy to portray the emotional and sexual struggles between mother, son and a young woman and there’s always a controversial risk in asking the question “Are our parents our first lovers?”. However, armed with the so-called undesirable desires, the story cruises the off-limits of incompetencies in expressing emotional and sexual self, which are magnificently portrayed by the director.
ALL THEY KNOW ABOUT LOVE will be my first feature fiction film as a delegate producer. My previous experiences in freelance producing taught me a great deal in working with limited budgets. The projects that I have been working on as associate producer in Liman Film have provided me with an accumulative experience of how to create European co-production schemes. As young filmmakers, both Melik and I, are ready to successfully execute our financial strategy and complete this ambitious film in the most uncompromising way possible. We participate in Cinelink in the hope we will make good friends and collaborators who will accompany us on this exciting journey.
Where are we at?
Total estimated budget: 491.000 €
Finances pending: 439.000 €
Financing in place: 52.000 €
Production timeline
Late Fall 2022 & Winter 2023 - Applications & Financing
Early Spring 2023 - Financing Closed & Soft Pre-production
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024 - Production & Shooting
Winter & Spring 2024 - Editing & Post-production
Fall 2024 & Onwards - World Premiere
Production company profile
Established by İrem Akbal in 2021, Istanbul-based creative production house BAL FILM focuses on quality narrative and non-narrative films both for international and local audiences, alongside providing line production services for foreign productions and customers.