Present Tense

Familiar to the Festival audience with her documentaries, Belmin Söylemez in Present Tense tells the story of a young woman who is in search for her lost hopes. Like many in our society, Mina is jobless, lonely, and unhappy. She wants to escape to the USA and start from zero; a familiar feeling to most of us. But how? She needs money, documents and a visa. She applies to a fortune-telling café –lying that she has experience. While she reads the coffee cups of many different women, she also tries to find a way out herself. Through the shapes emerging in coffee cups, she expresses her own frustrations and desires to match with those of the customers. Will she be able to get away from present tense and try her luck for the future? –IKSV