Winner of the Best New Narrative Filmmaker Award. Special Awards Screenings of this film will be held on May 4th (see schedule for details).
 

In March 2003, as American bombs began falling on Baghdad, Turkish actress Ayça Damgaci left her flat in Istanbul and headed for the Iraq border. Behind that cordon was Kurdish actor Hama Ali Khan, the love of Damgaci's life-her moon and stars, her Marlon and her Brando, her everything. Hüseyin Karabey makes his narrative debut retelling the tale of Damgaci's quixotic road trip to the war zone, with Damgaci playing herself and Khan appearing in the actual video love notes he sent to her during their time apart. My Marlon and Brando is a piece of rough magic, a film with a soul as light, a heart as heavy, and a will as steely as its heroine's own.

Karabey's experience as a director of documentaries shines through in his devotion to ethnographic detail-he's eager to let the camera stray, vérité-style, and this helps to bring home Damgaci's growing sense of dislocation. Borders may be porous, but it is still possible to feel a stranger in a strange land. Really, though, the movie is Damgaci's-a brave, tender, and frequently very funny tribute to her love for Khan. Read aloud, her letters to him make for something wonderful and new in the history of lovers beseeching. Communicating in English, their shared tongue, Damgaci's clumsy grasp of the language elevates into rhetoric all the more moving for being flawed. Likewise, through Khan's ham-fistedly hilarious videos, you miss him on Dagmaci's behalf. Politics may turn this comedy about unlikely lovers into a tragedy, but even in its fleeting ungainliness, My Marlon and Brando is a fitting homage to Damgaci and Khan, two matched souls that no impassable border could ever tear asunder. Co-hosted with The American Turkish Society and Moon and Stars Project.

– Peter Scarlet

Following the April 29th screening, American Express ® Cardmembers are invited to a complimentary after movie reception at the American Express Insider Center located at 27 Union Square West, Union Square Ballroom. Details to be provided at the theater!

Please join The American Turkish Society and Moon and Stars Project on May 2 for an In-Depth Conversation on the film, "Crossing Borders: A Cinematic Journey from the West to the East," with actress-writer Ayca Damgaci, Turkish-American journalist and filmmaker Bilge Ebiri, producer Lucinda Englehart, filmmaker Huseyin Karabey, and film critic Sukhdev Sandhu.