24.09.2026 | “Those Who Whistle After Dark” at FilmFest Hamburg
Father, mother, daughter, ghosts: That’s the simple formula behind Pınar Yorgancıoğlu’s feature debut “Those Who Whistle After Dark”. The black comedy celebrated its world premiere at the Goa International Film Festival 2025 and will have its German premiere at FilmFest Hamburg on 1 October. What does the film have to do with Hamburg? And how do you come up with a rather different kind of ghost story? Read on to find out.
They speak calmly into the camera. On a sofa, on a balcony, at a desk. They look like perfectly ordinary people. And yet, there are always little – and sometimes not-so-little – clues that something isn’t quite right. A cannula in the neck, constantly speaking in the past tense, an endless sense of melancholy, or floating above the ground: The ghosts in Pınar Yorgancıoğlu’s feature debut “Those Who Whistle After Dark” are fundamentally different from any ghosts we’ve seen on the big screen before. And that is precisely what makes the film so special.
At the heart of the story is a small Turkish family in Ankara: Father Melih used to run a natural history museum and has just retired – but has no idea what to do with all his newfound free time. Mother Suzan is a nurse and unhappy with her life. Daughter Toprak is an aspiring writer but prefers to spend her days playing first-person shooters online. And in between, people from their lives who died either recently or long ago return as ghosts to comment on the lives of the three main characters. Short interview sequences appear unexpectedly throughout the story, bringing us closer to Melih, Suzan and Toprak.
How the ghosts came to life
How do you come up with a story like this? “The mother of a friend from my master’s programme at Columbia University in New York once saw a ghost. The way she described it all sounded very real. We started joking about whether you could make a documentary in which the ghost gives an interview,” says filmmaker Yorgancıoğlu.
And that idea eventually found its way into the film. Instead of exploring the phenomenon of ghosts through the eyes of the living, she wanted to explore the living and their earthly struggles through the eyes of the ghosts. To take some of the heaviness out of the subject, Yorgancıoğlu repeatedly injects black humour. “That has a lot to do with my personality. I need that tone to balance the film and the subject for myself,” says the director.
Hamburg is part of the story, too
Work on the film began to gather momentum in 2018. Yorgancıoğlu developed the screenplay at the renowned Biennale College Cinema in Venice, where film projects have the chance to receive €150,000 in funding. “Even though I didn’t receive the funding in the end, I wrote the film with a small budget in mind. That really helped when it came to financing the project on the international film market,” says the director.
“Those Who Whistle After Dark” is a Turkish-German-Bulgarian co-production. Hamburg is represented by producer Sandra Müller and her company Marlene Film. “It was my first international arthouse project. I got involved through Hamburg producer Michael Eckelt, who was a great source of advice and support, especially in the early stages,” Müller explains. The project subsequently received funding from the German-Turkish Co-Production Development Fund, a joint programme by MOIN Film Fund, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and the Istanbul Film Festival – Meetings on the Bridge.
“I was very happy when Sandra came on board. We’re from the same generation and share the same understanding of stories and material. That helped a lot,” says Yorgancıoğlu. Cinematographer Jonas Schneider is another member of the team from Germany. Yorgancıoğlu had already worked with him on one of her earlier short films, and the two also developed the concept paper for “Those Who Whistle After Dark”.
In the editing room
Pınar Yorgancıoğlu is not only the film’s director and co-writer, together with Emre Gülcan, but also one of its three editors. Three editors? “The editor who edited the first cut had to leave the project because of other commitments. I worked on the second version on my own. For the third and final version, a third editor joined the project. And I think you can see all three of us in the film, but somehow it all fits together perfectly,” says the filmmaker with a laugh. In 2024/25, the team also took part in First Cut Lab and First Cut Lab+, where the film received its final polish.
Following its successful world premiere in Goa and further festival stops including Shanghai and Istanbul, where it won the Best Actress award to the up and coming actress İnci Sefa Cingöz, the film will screen in the Hamburger Premieren section at FilmFestHamburg. It is a universal urban middle class family story that is sure to put a smile on the faces of Hamburg cinemagoers more than once.
And one more thing: If you’re a pigeon lover, you definitely won’t want to miss this film. Rarely have these urban birds played such an important role as they do in “Those Who Whistle After Dark”. Want to know why? Come along to the premiere at Hamburg’s Metropolis Kino on 1 October at 9:45 pm.
