OZGE

Özge is a film about the quiet alienation that defines modern relationships. Growing up in a world shaped by mass consumption and digital connection, I became fascinated by how these forces erode the way we relate to one another and to ourselves. I also wanted to explore how the relationships and environments we romanticize rarely match the reality we return to.
What drew me to this story was a strange personal inversion. I left Istanbul for İzmir to study, and found myself gradually choosing to stay drawn to its stillness, its slower pace, its distance from the city I grew up in. Özge moves in the opposite direction: an İzmir native who relocates to Istanbul, only to return searching for something she left behind. Her journey mirrors mine in reverse, and that contrast became the emotional core of the film. We are both trying to belong somewhere, and neither of us quite manages it.
The characters are built from fragments of my own personality and the people closest to me. Özge's longing, her inability to connect, her impulse to consume as a way of coping these are things I recognize in myself. The film deliberately leaves Özge without resolution because I haven't found one either. This is a story I am still living, and I felt it would be dishonest to offer an ending I don't yet have.