One of Italy’s most successful and award-winning filmmakers, Turkish-born Ferzan Ozpetek creates films with a unique thematic focus that also display a considerable technical prowess. Rooted in melodramatic traditions, Ozpetek’s films often centre around seemingly content people whose lives become cast adrift—often by a sudden death—leading to the discovery of their own unconscious passions or possibilities for their lives. Ozpetek unites time periods and distant locales, and creates connections between protagonists and the families they discover, whether through friendships, communal living, or caring for those in need. His is a humanistic cinema in which the kindness of strangers is the most readily available because as he sees it, we are all family.
Winner of Best Film at the 2003 Italian Academy Awards, Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Raoul Bova star in this tale of a woman stuck in a waning marriage and the Holocaust survivor she cares for.
Ferzan Ozpetek’s 2001 Italian Golden Globe-winner follows a woman who befriends her husband’s lover after she finds out about his affair; starring Margherita Buy and Stefano Accorsi.
One of Ferzan Ozpetek’s most awarded films, Riccardo Scamarcio stars in this amiable comedy about a son’s journey home to southern Italy to finally come out to his family.
An enigmatic affair unravels against the backdrop of Naples, in Ferzan Ozpetek’s new box-office hit mystery starring Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Alessandro Borghi.