Sumptuous visions of jinns, giants and demons flew from the brush of Siyah Kalem (‘Black Pen’), a mysterious artist from 15th-Century Central Asia. His unique paintings, preserved in the Topkapı Palace Collection in Istanbul, offer a glimpse into life on the remote steppe during the Middle Ages. Even as Siyah Kalem himself continues to remain an enigma, his works are intriguing and inspiring artists today. Among them are Richard Bartle, an interdisciplinary British artist whose work crosses boundaries between contemporary art, archaeology, and heritage, and Mehmet Can Özer, an academician and composer and performer of electroacoustic and instrumental music from Izmir. Directed by Selin Aktaş and Murat Kadir Toy, this award-winning documentary takes the works of Siyah Kalem as a starting point to explore Central Asian visual culture and nomadic life, sharing how this unique artistic heritage is being physically preserved and how it is being interpreted in unusual acts of cultural continuity. The film had its Turkey premiere at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival and its North American Premiere at the Seattle Turkish Film Festival in 2025, and it was awarded the Suha Arın Prize at the Golden Saffron Film Festival in 2026.

Selin Aktaş & Murat Kadir Toy
Selin Aktaş received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Cinema and TV from Çukurova University in 2018 and Mersin University in 2023, respectively. After training as a camera operator under Portuguese director Gustavo Fonseca, Aktaş covered international sports events, including Super League, Champions League, UEFA, and Euro basketball matches. Her short films Suicide Watchman, Hide and Seek, For Sale and The Farmer were screened at national and international festivals, including a screening of The Farmer at Foça Film Days 2024. Aktaş was also part of the directing team on the documentaries The Voice of a Generation: Rap Alaturka and Vertical Route, both of which were broadcast on TRT. She currently works as an editor for Habitat TV. Murat K. Toy was born in Istanbul in 1972 and studied at Marmara University’s Faculty of Communication. He started his career in television and documentary filmmaking in 1997 as an assistant director on Haberci, one of Turkey’s longest-running television documentary programmes, moving into the role of director from 2000-2002. In 2003, he founded his own production companies under the names 81 Yapım and Şarküteri Prodüksiyon. Toy went on to serve as general director and manager at İzTV, Turkey’s first domestic documentary channel. In 2021, he became a founding partner and General Director of Turkey’s New Life Channel, Habitat TV.