Emin Fırat Övür
IT
Born in captivity, torn from her family, sold into privilege, and abandoned on the streets of Istanbul, a dog comes of age while learning to survive in a world shaped by both care and cruelty.
SYNOPSIS
Born in a shabby breeding farm, a puppy is torn away from her mother and sold as a birthday gift to an upper-middle-class family. For a while, she is loved. But as she grows, affection gives way to neglect, and she is abandoned on the streets of Istanbul. There, she learns to survive among sharply different human worlds: homes, pavements, shelters, and fleeting relationships, encountering tenderness, indifference, companionship, and cruelty in shifting forms. With each trial, she becomes more resilient and capable of finding her own way. As she grows from a cute puppy into a stray dog fighting to live, pregnancy drives her to search for safety, yet no true refuge ever holds. In this way, İT unfolds as an unconventional coming-of-age story. Her journey through the city reflects the complex, contradictory ways humans relate to life itself.
DIRECTOR
Emin Fırat Övür
WRITER
Emin Fırat Övür
PRODUCER
Emin Fırat Övür Emin Fırat Övür
PRODUCTION COMPANY
Mercury Production, Alaz Film
COUNTRY
Türkiye
GENRE
Fiction
Emin Fırat Övür
DIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Emin Fırat Övür was born in Istanbul in 1984. He began making short films at an early age and pursued his film education in New York City after graduating from the Saint Benoît French High School in Istanbul. He studied mass media at SUNY Plattsburgh and later continued his education in directing and cinematography at CUNY Brooklyn College. Since returning to Türkiye in 2013, he has worked across film and visual art, directing feature-length documentaries and short films while also exhibiting his work as a photographer and video artist. İT is his first fiction feature.
“I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” —Chuang-Tzu. In IT, I want to create a dreamlike experience that brings the viewer as close as possible to the existence of a stray dog. Dogs occupy a peculiar place in our lives; they often exist in a condition of objectified affection: loved at times, forgotten at others, intimate with us yet never fully included, both familiar and strangely alien. The film is an unconventional coming-of-age story, unfolding as a journey through captivity, domesticity, abandonment, and survival. Staying with the dog changes not only what we see, but how we experience the world. At her level, people are read less through their faces than through their bodies, voices, and actions, while the environment becomes a geography of textures, sounds, and fleeting details to be explored anew. Beneath the story, IT observes our relationship to life itself, and cinema’s power to carry us beyond ourselves.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Atilla Salih Yucer
PRODUCER’S BIOGRAPHY
Atilla Salih Yucer is a film producer who has been working in independent cinema since the early 2000s. He studied English literature and film in Paris and New York City and is currently based between Istanbul and Stockholm. Yucer cut his teeth working as a first assistant director on films by such visionary directors as Steve McQueen (Shame), Wes Anderson (Asteroid City), David Gordon Green (Prince Avalanche; Joe; Halloween Trilogy), Jim Jarmusch (The Dead Don't Die), Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite; The Killing of a Sacred Deer), Mira Nair (Queen of Katwe), David Chase (The Many Saints of Newark), Todd Solondz (Dark Horse), and Errol Morris (Wormwood), among others. He transitioned into producing for hire as well as developing projects from the ground up through his company Alaz Film. Recent producer credits include The Exorcist: Believer for Blumhouse, Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, and Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value, which took the Grand Prix at the Festival de Cannes in 2025 and received nine Academy Award nominations. Yucer recently wrapped principal photography on Arnaud Desplechin’s The Thing That Hurts and Sara Driver’s The Odd Enchantment of Madam P, and is currently preparing new films by Jarmusch and Solondz.
PRODUCER’S STATEMENT
From the moment I first encountered IT, I was struck by how radically it asks us to reconsider our relationship with the world around us. Rather than simply telling the story of a stray dog in Istanbul, the film invites us to inhabit a perspective that is rarely explored in cinema. What draws me to the project is its ability to transform a deeply local reality into something universally resonant through observation rather than explanation. I am interested in films that take creative risks, and IT does so with remarkable confidence and sensitivity. I believe IT has the potential to connect with international audiences because it offers a fresh and deeply immersive cinematic experience that is universal.
Through its distinctive visual language and immersive perspective, IT offers audiences a new way of seeing the spaces we share with non-human lives, while at the same time it serves as a metaphor for the underprivileged and vulnerable lives that we are discarding and leaving to fend for themselves in a harsh world during these dark days.
Production company profile
Founded in 2003, Mercury Production is a Türkiye-based company working across media and audiovisual production, with a focus on documentary filmmaking. Its credits include the feature-length documentaries Independence or Death, Apartment Istanbul, and Anatolian Tales; institutional projects for TÜSİAD; and digital media activities under the Hür Haber brand. It is now expanding into feature-length fiction filmmaking and international co-production.
Where are we at?
TOTAL ESTIMATED BUDGET
440.000 €
NEEDED FOR COMPLETION
50.000 €
Looking for at CineLink?
We are looking for the right partners to accompany the film through its final post-production stage and into international circulation. We are particularly seeking post-production support, sales and festival positioning, and meaningful connections with professionals who are responsive to the film’s sensorial language and unconventional point of view. As a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of a stray dog, İT needs completion support alongside the right context in which its artistic and emotional qualities can be fully recognised.We are looking for the right partners to accompany the film through its final post-production stage and into international circulation. We are particularly seeking post-production support, sales and festival positioning, and meaningful connections with professionals who are responsive to the film’s sensorial language and unconventional point of view. As a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of a stray dog, İT needs completion support alongside the right context in which its artistic and emotional qualities can be fully recognised.