Fetih 1453

In the spring of 1453, Sultan Mehmed II laid siege to Constantinople — the city that had stood for over a thousand years and that the Ottoman Empire had failed to take four times before. Fetih 1453 tells that story on an enormous scale: the siege, the walls, the naval manoeuvre that changed everything, and the 21-year-old sultan who was willing to do whatever it took.

Made with a budget unusual for Turkish cinema at the time, the film holds up as a serious piece of historical action filmmaking. Devrim Evin plays Sultan Mehmed with the right mixture of conviction and unpredictability, and İbrahim Çelikkol is memorable as Ulubatlı Hasan, the soldier whose story became one of the defining images of the conquest. It was the highest-grossing Turkish film ever made at the time of its release.