I want to shoot this film as I came to write it: by living within it to the final stop. Only there you see the real face of Istanbul which is said to be next to paradise. Not many people get there. But when you are there you are heading for your lost paradise in this world. I have been traversing back and forth in my hometown in time and between culturally competing continents to the other side of the worlds only city to straddle two continents and two worlds, where time and space really transcend into a new reality.

Istanbul is like an epiphany. You fall in love with the beauty of the city, but cannot define why it is so beautiful. With Istanbul, it is impossible to cut the long story short! For Istanbul has multiple layers, multiple realities. For everyone, the experience is different, overwhelming. Very few people know the difference or dare to talk about it!

With this project I aim to talk about it! I also believe Turkey and Greece share many cultural dynamics, the most obvious being coffee or similar-sounding dishes or drinks; but they also have a single secret in common. To the Greeks it is Constantinople and to the Turks Istanbul. It means quite different things to them both. Yet no one dares to talk about them in any depth. Why? Because, they dont really know what they are talking about! What can be said of both sides is that they have probably never managed to find Truth in the first place!

So this film talks about finding truth in and out of Istanbul. So it is imperative to go further, to break out of this reality and see beyond to capture the citys meaning:

A photographer of the worlds lost habitats, Baris is wandering the world in search of Truth returns to his hometown Istanbul, happens across Truth in a cupboard in his fathers workshop, a veteran filmmaker now in hospital after suffering a stroke on set. Having found Truth amongst his fathers script notes and pilot footage of unfinished films, Baris now has to leave the city on the Philia Express.

It now looks as if his fathers film will be completed by Baris himself: but it wont happen on a film set this time, rather in a new life where Baris discovers the meaning of real beauty as opposed to Istanbul, so manifestly beautiful, but can never be found in this world behind the seven veils of the apparent, but carefully disguised beauty of it all.

This film will be the first where I seek abandoned people living with genuine love on the road to their Istanbul.