Şerafettin Can Atalay (Nebil Özgentürk, 2025) docu + filmmaker in attendance

Şerafettin Can Atalay
(Nebil Özgentürk, 2025, Turkish with English subtitles, Digital)

-- Q&A to follow with director Nebil Özgentürk

This documentary film portrays the life and public struggle of Can Atalay, a prominent Turkish human rights lawyer and and elected Member of Parliament who remains imprisoned despite a binding ruling by Turkey’s Constitutional Court—revealing a profound constitutional and democratic crisis.

For decades, Atalay has represented victims of state violence, labor disasters, environmental destruction, and political repression. Through interviews, archival footage, and personal reflections, the film traces Atalay’s legal advocacy on behalf of workers, environmental activists, and civil society groups, as well as the broader democratic and judicial challenges in contemporary Turkey. Framed as both a personal portrait and a political chronicle, the film explores themes of justice, resistance, solidarity, and the costs of dissent from the Gezi Park protests of 2013 to the present.

The screening will include special participation by acclaimed filmmaker Nebil Özgentürk, offering audiences the opportunity to engage directly with the filmmaker’s perspective on the story and its wider implications.

As an award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, and writer, for more than thirty years Nebil Özgentürk has been one of Turkey's most important chroniclers of cultural and political memory, documenting the lives and ideas of the country's leading writers, thinkers, artists, and public intellectuals. His work has long served as a living archive of Turkey's intellectual life.

Today, his camera turns toward a different subject: the erosion of the rule of law itself. Having spent decades preserving collective memory, Özgentürk now documents its deepest injustices.

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Screen/Society screenings are free and open to the public.

Parking Info:  https://artscenter.duke.edu/parking

COVID-19 Info: https://cinematicarts.duke.edu/covid-19-information