Yeşim Ustaoğlu

Dream Workers is an intimate and daring journey into women's creativity, dreams, and unexpected confrontations by life through the intertwined stories of eight women filmmakers and a village women's theatre group from Turkey. The conditions of urban and cultural gentrification, pandemic, and isolation that initially threaten the film become part of the film. Listening to the creation stories of these women directors, including the director of the documentary, the audience experiences their different ways of living life and making art under the contemporary socio-cultural dynamics of Turkey.

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Two film school graduates intimidated by the gender stereotypes that pervade film industry decide to make a documentary to explore the issue. The two women spend two years shooting, make 5000 kilometers, talk to established women directors and record every moment of this journey of discovery and self-discovery. But the real journey is just about to begin.

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Turkish film industry has been experiencing a breakthrough in the last ten years. According to 2015 figures, there is a bold uptrend in terms of viewers and film production. Yet without any regulations at work, this growth only made injustices in distribution bigger. While a single cinema chain controls more then 50% of the market, it also started to control distribution and production. In this monopolized environment, there seems to be no country for independent production. With the guidance of producers, distributors, and economists, the film traces the distortion created by the bad economy that has become an obstacle for freedom of choice.

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The film portrays the bus journey of a young woman played by the director herself. Throughout the journey, the woman's mind goes off to a few imaginary time zones and she starts dreaming about what could happen

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A man with no recorded memory about his past finds himself in a bar, following a mysterious woman whom he finds familiar. This abrupt encounter leads him to the discovery of his repressed, hidden desires. But his reactions to this unfamiliar world backlash, and he finds himself enclosed in a never ending loop.

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Şehnaz, a young female psychiatrist from Istanbul, starts mandatory duty in a provincial town. Back in the city, she maintains a marriage that looks flawless on the outside. Elmas, a young woman on the verge of breakdown, opens a new path in her.

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Araf is the story of Zehra and Olgun whose lives are caught in a vacuum. The world in which they live and work is a place of throwaway culture and constant change. They too are waiting for a chance to change and escape from their empty, monotonous lives.

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When an aging matriarch starts showing signs of dementia, her dysfunctional family in Istanbul must navigate a minefield of unresolved issues to care for her.

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Mehmet, a young Turkish man newly migrated from Tire, takes a job searching for water leaks below the surface of the streets of Istanbul. Due to a strange set of events, he is mistaken for a Kurd, imprisoned, and brutally beaten. Upon his release, he becomes an outcast marked as a Kurd.

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