About the film

In Belonging, Burak Çevik's sophomore feature, an unblinking eye is fixed on the people and places of his family’s trauma.

Inspired by the violent death of Çevik’s grandmother at the hands of his aunt and her lover, Belonging upsets the expectations of the true crime genre by observing the story from two unorthodox perspectives. In the film’s first half, a cold reading of the police report plays out over searing tableaus of empty Turkish cityscapes, paying homage to the emotive vistas of James Benning’s Landscape Suicide. The second half lets us in on the warm moments of the couple’s first meeting, challenging viewers to psychoanalyze and seek answers in an encounter that may have none. 

Part austere crime procedural, part elliptical character drama, Belonging reimagines the possibilities of narrative non-fiction, and its audaciously disparate halves combine to perform something like an exorcism on his family’s haunted past. —Evan Bower

(with English subtitles)

About the filmmaker

Burak Çevik received his BA in Film Faculty at Istanbul Bilgi University. He founded Fol Cinema Society and curated experimental and art house film screenings. His debut feature film, The Pillar of Salt, premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2018. His second feature film, Belonging, premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2019. Currently he is teaching at Istanbul Bilgi University.