Blind Whistle
A tragicomedy of an unfinished man. Münir, a fifty-year-old left-handed barber, has spent his life clipping hair and hiding behind a whistle. His mother's death leaves him with one written demand: atEid al-Adha, slaughter the sacrificial animal with your own hand. He refuses. But her voice will not let him go. He visits her grave, consults imams, and tries the cut on a frightened chicken at night. The sacrifice in his garden bears his name. A strange shepherd called İbrahim, his "double", herds candle-lit animals through the dark. As family, ritual, and the dead close in, Münir muast answer his mother from the other side, not with her knife, but with the tools of his own life.
Director's note
I come from Ağrı, in Eastern Anatolia, where 'adam etme' — the work of making a man of a boy — is done by fathers and uncles, by ritual, and by the meat of holiday sacrifice. Münir, the fifty-year-old barber at the heart of Blind Whistle, never quite finished becoming one.
The film began for me with a single image: Münir, folded double inside a plastic basin under his mother's bed, hiding from the world. I have known this man all my life, in family, in neighbours, in myself. A left-handed boy in a right-handed world, he has stayed close to his mother's skirts and taken refuge in the rhythm of his scissors and the whistle he learned as a child. When his mother dies, she leaves him a written demand he cannot meet: slaughter the sacrificial animal with his hands at Eid al-Adha.
I first found him in Eyüp Tosun's short story 'Münir Bey,' which carried the weight of adam etme with humour and tenderness. I wanted to make a film that could hold both.
My short films — The School Bus, Things Unheard Of, and The Moisture, among them — have walked this same edge, shown at Clermont-Ferrand, PÖFF and Venice. Blind Whistle is the feature they were preparing me for.
Blind Whistle is a tragicomedy because Münir's situation is both absurd and unbearable. It is touched by magical realism because the rules of inheritance, what a mother can ask from the grave, what a doubled stranger called İbrahim, a holy fool herding candle-lit animals through the dark, can mirror back, are not realist rules. The small Anatolian town where it takes place is religious and absurd, tender and cornered, full of jokes that hurt.
What matters to me most is Münir's answer. He does not kill. He does not refuse outright. He reaches for the tool of his own life, his scissors, and finds a third way between the knife his mother hands him and the silence of saying no. I believe many of us are looking for that third way.
Producer's note
I've known Ramazan Kılıç since our college years, long before either of us called ourselves filmmakers, and what's stayed with me through every project of his since is the same quality I recognised in him then: an unwillingness to settle for the “easy version” of a story. When he first described Münir Bey to me, I didn't need convincing. I needed to be part of it.
Kör Islık refuses to resolve that tension into pure tragedy or pure comedy, and I think that refusal is exactly its strength, both artistically and commercially. Audiences are hungry for films that trust them to hold two feelings at once. The magical realism running through the script gives the story a visual and emotional language that travels well beyond Ankara.
The project arrives to thwart Script Pool with a solid foundation. The script is in its third draft. We've already secured €56,000 in equity from co-producer Ekin Koç, €100,000 from our French co-producer Orphée Film, and a €15,000 minimum guarantee from sales agent MPM Premium Films — together close to 26% of the total budget (Turkish-French co-production structure already in place). That gives us a real foundation to build on, and it's precisely why we're coming to Tallinn to collaborate with additional co-producers, financiers, and sales or distribution presence across Central, Eastern and Northern Europe, who can be part of our project and carry the film into markets the Turkish-French structure doesn't yet reach.
Our strategy is festival-first, then theatrical. Pre-production runs from April 2026 to July 2028, with four weeks of principal photography in August 2028. Post-production is planned to be completed around January 2029, and a sales and distribution window from January 2029 to February 2030.