Ömür Kınay

Ömür Kınay — Biography

Ömür Kınay is a director who works as both a filmmaker and an academic; to the wider public she first became known as one of the symbolic figures of the 17 August 1999 earthquake. She was pulled alive from the rubble of the apartment block in Sefaköy she had just moved into, at the age of twenty, and lives with a disability from the injury she suffered in the quake. Some sources give her name as Ömür Kınay Alkan.

She studied painting at a vocational high school, took distance courses at Anadolu University, and showed her paintings in local group exhibitions. In 2005 she won a scholarship to study communication design at Istanbul Kültür University, graduating in 2009; she learned English in Brighton and later earned a master's there. Her three-minute-twenty-second short Kün deals with seven pieces of advice from Rumi and won Best Experimental Film at the 14th Golden Boll Film Festival in 2007. Earlier she had received a jury special award from İnönü University and a short film award from Yıldız Technical University. In her animation Empati, a non-disabled person looks for work in the world of disabled people.

She now pursues an academic career at Istanbul Bilgi University, writing on consumer culture, cinema and pictograms. Her legal case arising from the earthquake, which ran for about fourteen years, ended in her favour at the Constitutional Court in 2019. In a 2023 interview she said she had never shared a photograph of the wreckage, and she has also warned about the pace of construction in Istanbul.