Welcome to 2026 my project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.
Today’s feature is from the year 2004, we are headed to Turkey to find a mysterious woman in…
Movie: Neredesin Firuze [Where’s Firuze?]
Year: 2004
Director: Ezel Akay
Country: Turkey
The Elevator Pitch: Hayri and Orhan are two sleazy musical promoters who need to find their next big act to stave off a debt. They manage to land themselves with more trouble than they can manage after the singer they hire is sought after by a mysterious woman.
How Was the Movie?:
I suspect that unfortunately something might have been lost in translation here. Despite having a lot of similar elements to the Turkish movie we watched last year (Mortal World), Where’s Firuze? didn’t really ever come together in the same way. We struggled with kind of iffy subtitles also but even when looking up some more information in general the movie left me a little cold.
What is very interesting about this movie is how deeply ingrained migration between Germany and Turkey were still in the mid-00s and how the systems in Turkey haven’t quite moved over to digital or even out of some of the 90s models for music, marriage, and even talk shows.
The downfall of this movie is mostly that it has very little structure holding it together either in acts or characters. Sometimes there are pops of humor and some extremely fun moments but generally it’s actually quite bleak. The movie hinges on the fact that everyone in the music industry is sneaky and underhanded while also being an idiot (which again, is not far off from Mortal World) but with an overly long run time and some very strange choices for side plots it basically gives itself enough rope to hang itself over the main joke.
If there are belly laughs to be had they didn’t make the jump into English. Despite it all the songs are pretty good, the character actors are all very memorable, and it’s a colorful peacock of a film so it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen but give this one a pass there’s way better stuff out there.
Also, it’s 2004 and cellphones are now popping up regularly but they still are an off item for main characters so I wonder what the turning point will be before every contemporary movie character has one.
What was for Dinner?:
I decided to make pide, specifically ıspanaklı pide (spinach pide) for Turkey but you might notice it’s a little more boat shaped and that’s because I have a narrow oven. I should have made three long and thin boats instead of two chubby boats but it still worked out great. Pide is basically like a mix between a pizza and an adjarian khachapuri. We filled these with just some spinach, manchego, and low moisture mozzarella because I didn’t want to spend a ton of time finding a place that sells kaşar. Then I topped it with an egg that I cooked until it was perfectly runny.
You can technically fill pide with anything you want but it’s best to keep it pretty simple.
These came out so fabulous I actually made them once more since this movie night and my only advice is: do not skimp on the quality of the fillings! Also there are few things that a jammy egg can’t make better 🙂
That’s it for 2004, see you in the future year of 2005!