Caricature by Necdet Yılmaz, April 6th 2012, NEW YORK
Fetih (Conquest) 1453: Conquest of Istanbul Opens April 6 in New York Area
Most Expensive and Lavish Turkish Film of All Time
Earns The Highest Western European and Turkish Grosses
(7 million admissions), Makes US Debut
WHAT: FETIH 1453: The Conquest of Istanbul, which NeoClassics Films, Ltd. will distribute in the US this spring.
WHEN: OPENING Friday April 6, 2012.
Check local listings for times.
PRESS SCREENING – 10AM Wednesday, April 4, 2012
WHERE: PRESS SCREENING AT DOLBY 24 SCREENING ROOM, 1350 Ave. of the Americas, 28th Floor, New York, NY 10019
AMC Theatres
AMC Empire 25
234 West 42 Street, New York, NY 10036
AMC Loews Roosevelt 8
630 Old Country Road,, Garden City, NY 11530
AMC Loews Ridgefield 12
75 Challenger Road, Ridgefield Park, NJ 07660
AMC Loews Rockaway 16
363 Mount Hope Avenue, Rockaway, NJ 07866
MORE: Turkish with English subtitles. Running Time 160 minutes
Directed by Faruk Aksoy.
In 1451, Constantinople, the last outpost of the Eastern Roman Empire, was all that stood between consolidation of the Ottoman Empire from Turkey across the Bosporus to the Balkans. The cold war of its time, tensions simmered since the birth of Islam—and roiled the splintered Christian factions of the West.
That year, 19-year-old Fatih Mehmet ascends the Ottoman throne. Equally green and underestimated, Mehmet hopes to succeed where his father failed: conquest of the elusive Constantinople. Over two years, as Mehmet builds forts and ships, blockades the Bosporus and musters his armies, Emperor Constantine is mindful of the threat and carefully plots against them with his allies.
On Easter, 1453, tens of thousands of Ottoman soldiers mass at Constantinople’s gates, facing the giant walls of one of the best-protected cities in the world. In six weeks, the city falls. The legacy of this conquest is the uneasy coexistence that has persisted between Christian and Muslim cultures in the area for the ensuing 550 years.
This sprawling historical epic not only brings to life the dawn of modern warfare and the birth of the Renaissance, but also of the personalities swirling around the conflict from popes, kings and sultans but a civil engineer, a soldier, and a daughter—as always, the human faces of geopolitical conflict .
Fetih is “remarkable for the entirely unselfconscious way it celebrates war and conquest.” says The International Herald Tribune’s Andrew Finkel. The film manages to combine blood and battle with a feel-good factor. We shed not a tear for the end of Byzantium. The film might have been pitched to the movie moguls as ‘Troy’ meets ‘Starship Troopers’ meets ‘Shakespeare in Love.’”
