SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Turkish first-time writer and director Melik Kuru’s Dump of Untitled Pieces had its American premiere this weekend at Slamdance. It is an intriguing, clever Möbius strip of a drama that challenges the conventions of the art market.
The story centers on Asli, played by Manolya Maya, a producer in her own right but here turning in a lambent, gorgeous performance as young photographer Asli, whose work is sufficiently personal that the question of selling it might be unhinging her. Or everyone else. It’s hard to tell.
At the film’s outset, she is stuck in a creative furrow/rut; “twenty months of hands” is how she describes her growing pile of intimate street photographs, but otherwise she’s happy. She gets by with the chaste friendship of her World of Warcraft addicted flatmate, Murat (a warm and fun performance from Ekremcan Arslandag), but she is seriously starting to feel doubts about art.
However, since she is dropping pictures like confetti, and since she’s being evicted, the pair start to trot around galleries with Murat posing as her manager to see if they can’t sell something. That’s when the real fun begins.
Melik Kuru’s film has something to say and plenty of ways to say it. The series of vignettes Asli has with vacuous and cynical gallery owners seems designed to do nothing but confuse or demoralize. Timing is everything, and by the time Asli gets to a gallery owner with the words “YOU ARE NOTHING” as a huge neon sign behind her, it feels like the natural punchline to a beautifully built shaggy dog joke. Then, when Asli finally snaps at the howling emptiness of it all, a petty act of violence starts to unfold in unexpected ways.
“…the pair start to trot around galleries with Murat posing as her manager to see if they can’t sell something.”
From hereon in, the script is so highfalutin’ and artful you can sense even the satire nearly leaving in confusion, but it is all mounted so clearly and cleverly. The tight cropping of Baris Aygen’s exquisitely textured black and white photography causes a perfect and natural friction between what we see and what we understand, a condition that seems to have struck everyone else here like a plague. And the inky imagery renders Istanbul into such a wild place, it’s starkly shot, little hills forming a wacky MC Escher print that constantly shakes to election propaganda hurled out of booming vans. All this presentation serves the film’s themes well, and Kuru’s script and direction are never less than fascinating and effective.
And there are also plenty of laughs and human interest, because alongside the really rather complex meditation on art and occasional light surrealism, there are some lovely depictions of not only the friendship between Asli and Murat, but also the antagonists. None more so than Mete, played by Tugrul Tulek, a smoothly cunning gallery owner who treads a deliciously unclear line between perhaps engaging Asli with her most rewarding artistic impulses or packaging them all up to sell her out as a lifeless performance piece. Whether that is a meta, fruitful artistic path or just murder in plain sight is maybe the central question here, and Tulek’s serpentine performance is a perfect foil to Asli’s clear-eyed ambitions. Finally, props go to Tülin Özen, in a short, mad turn as a touchy-feely gallery owner with a broken intimacy thermostat.
The soundtrack is beautiful, rollicking jazz by Efe Demiral, and it just helps to deliver this quirky little drama with that bit of extra zest, reminding us how little we see of this fascinating, energetic city on screen. This in itself is touched upon by one of those gallery owners, spurning Asli’s photographs on behalf of her Western clients; “They don’t want the personal. They specialize in that. What they want from us is tragedy.”
There is not much of that here. Kuru’s film is a warm and funny triumph, touching on the absurdities of life and art with expert skill.
Dump of Untitled Pieces screened at the Slamdance Film Festival.
"…YOU ARE NOTHING"
