Ömür Kınay

Ömür Kınay — Biography

Ömür Kınay (born 1979 in Istanbul) is a Turkish film director; her date of birth is recorded only to the year. She studied at Istanbul Bilgi University and Anadolu University, and won a Golden Boll award for her short film Kün. As a disabled director she is often cited as a figure of visibility in Turkish cinema.

She is widely known in Turkey as one of the "symbol names" of the earthquake of 17 August 1999; footage of her rescue from the rubble became one of the most remembered images of the disaster. In later interviews she described the years that followed and how she rebuilt her life through education, noting that she has "never shared a photograph of the wreckage" and keeping her distance from the reuse of disaster imagery. Some sources give her name as Ömür Kınay Alkan.

Her legal case arising from the earthquake, which ran for some fourteen years, was decided in her favour by Turkey's Constitutional Court in 2019; newspapers including Milliyet and Halk TV treated the ruling as a precedent. She has also spoken publicly about the pace of construction in Istanbul.