This year’s twentieth Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival is ramping things up in the next few weeks to head off a week-long virtual festival beginning July 3. The festival recently rolled out its eight first titles, one of which includes Turkish filmmaker Emre Akay’s third feature endeavor, AV: The Hunt.
Six years in the making, project was originally campaigned on Indiegogo away from the state-funded film circuit, and billed as “a hard-boiled, fast-paced thriller set in patriarchal Turkey”. The film stars actress Billur Melis Koç, and actors Ahmet Rıfat Şungar and Yağızcan Konyalı, from a script by Akay and co-scribe Deniz Cuylan, and is produced by Tolga Topçu of JaguarProjects, Diloy Gûlün of Karma Films.
REVENGE meets MIDNIGHT EXPRESS in this survival tale of an adulterous woman is hunted by her own relatives to wash the family honor.A young couple makes love when a cop barges in. Young and athletic Ayse escapes but her lover dies.
Now all the men in her family are chasing her around the city and the countryside to avenge their honor. Ayse’s only key for survival is to become as ruthless as those hunting her.
Honor crimes still make the news constantly in several countries today. Women killed by their own parents, husbands, brothers, cousins… to defend archaic values. AV THE HUNT is a realistic thriller depicting a young woman’s fight in a patriarchal society that is bound to create headlines too with its strong feminist message.
WTF Films has dibs on the international sales front, while the full NIFFF line-up for 2020 is expected to go live on June 18.