KUNDURA CINEMA UNVEILS THE WONDER OF ISTANBUL
A landmark of Turkey’s industrial and cultural heritage, Beykoz Kundura revives a cinematic legacy with the launch of Kundura Cinema on 17 November 2018, supported by a programme of curated screenings and parallel activities.
To celebrate its opening, Kundura Cinema will hold a preview screening of master noir craftsman Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948), on the 3rd of November 2018.
Established in the early 1800s as a leather factory and then redeveloped as a shoe factory in 1933, Beykoz Kundurahas played a crucial role in the industrialization programmes of both the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. With over 200 years of uninterrupted industrial production, it has come to represent a unique example of Turkey’s industrial and cultural heritage. In its heyday, Beykoz Kundura held regular film screenings and the factory’s cinema programme provided an important cultural experience to the daily lives of its workers. Now, The Boiler Room, which formed the heart of the factory complex, has been restored for the Kundura Cinema project to serve as one of the newest, and yet most historic, cultural platforms in Istanbul.
Following Beykoz Kundura Film Days, which included special screenings titled Restored Film Days, Nightmares Under Snowand A Midsummer’s Night Cinema, Kundura Cinema now invites audiences to an alternative cinema experience, offering a unique thematic screening and event programme and a new destination for culture in the city.
Films wandering in cities
Kundura Cinema’s first annual film selection will focus on films traveling around cities, taking audiences on a journey to all corners of the world, from the first modern cities to the present, from huge metropolises to dystopian cities of the future, from New York to Paris, from Berlin to Mexico, from Tokyo to Istanbul…
The programme will include masterpieces never previously screened in Turkey, with titles selected from diverse cinematic genres ranging from narrative to experimental, drama to comedy and film noir to science fiction, investigating the soul, rhythm and the light of cities, and the people that inhabit them.
