Onat Kutlar

Onat Kutlar — Biography

Onat Kutlar helped shape his country's film culture as a Turkish poet, short-story writer and screenwriter. He is best remembered for his story collection İshak and for founding the Turkish Sinematek Association, which opened Turkey to world cinema. He died in January 1995 of injuries from a bomb attack.

While studying law at Istanbul University he left before his last exam and went to Paris to study philosophy; two years later he returned and worked at the magazine Doğan Kardeş. İshak (1959), nine stories mostly told through a child's eyes, won the Turkish Language Association's short-story prize in 1960, and the critic Fethi Naci counts it among the early examples of magical realism. His attention then moved to cinema: in 1965 he founded the Sinematek Association and the journal Yeni Sinema, running the association until 1976. As a screenwriter he worked on Hazal, Yusuf ile Kenan and Hakkâri'de Bir Mevsim, adapted from Ferit Edgü's novel.

He served on the organising board of the Istanbul Film Festival and on the jury of the 1985 Berlin Film Festival, and received, in 1994, France's L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He collected his poems in Peralı Bir Aşk İçin Divan and Unutulmuş Kent. A bomb left at the café of the Marmara Hotel in Taksim on 30 December 1994 wounded him gravely, and he died on 11 January 1995. The attack was later found to have been organised by the PKK. The FIPRESCI prize in the Istanbul Film Festival's national competition bears his name.