This year, Jaws celebrates its 45th birthday: the film that forever changed the meaning of summer cinema around the world, shaped the studios’ box-office strategy, and made an entire generation rethink its relationship with swimming in the sea. Seen from today, with both its political subtext and its technical choices, Jaws is in fact a very young film that still captures the spirit of every era. While there is something fitting about watching its final screening, at exactly 45 years old, on the screen set up by the sea in Beykoz, it is impossible not to look back, from where we stand today, at A Summer Night Cinema, which brought this film to us, and at everything it showed us.

On the open-air screen, from In the Mood for Love to Call Me by Your Name, from Paris, Texas to Ema, we met films from many countries and genres all summer long. Arriving at just the right place and time, these films seemed to say a great deal about a condition of never quite reaching one another that belongs to our present. In the end, they were all brimming with relationships that suffer from a failure to communicate, from drawn-out separations, and from unexpected partings of ways.

In the program where we also watched Leon: The Professional, the film once again left us alone with the question, “Could you love an assassin?” In a world where loving and being loved has begun to grow rather difficult, at a time when most of us were spending more time with ourselves than ever, perhaps we remembered this thing called love once more as a way of setting out, first of all, from ourselves. Just as In the Mood for Love brings time and space to a standstill, and Call Me by Your Name speeds them up. With Ema’s flooding, overflowing music and colors, and the boundless plains of Paris, Texas, we reached out from the Kundura screen toward the borders of love, which are always bound up with separation.

Now that we have come to the end of a summer night’s dream, while the world still feels as though it is caught in a strange sleep amid all its uncertainty, this selection also opened up room to reflect on how cinema might once again become an escape and a safe space. We don’t know when we will return to movie theaters, but we are so glad that we had such a summer night.

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