The Crab Game is a 2009 Turkish drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 written and directed by Ali Özgentürk

Ali Özgentürk

Ali Özgentürk is a renowned Turkish film director, screenwriter, and producer. He was born in 1947 in Adana, Turkey. After studying philosophy and sociology at Istanbul University, he became involved in theater, as an actor, director, and playwright. He founded Istanbul's first street theater...

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Plot

Asya (Ayça İnci) is a research assistant working in the history department of a university in İstanbul. Taking her 5-year-old daughter with her, Asya embarks on a journey back to her hometown with the dream of starting over again. There she gets a new job at a school. She starts working on a project that is about to change her entire life along with that of her students. While conducting research on old Ottoman court documents, Asya and her students come across an interesting incident. In the year 1917, a local mobster called Yengeç Salih killed a midwife called Nuriye, claiming that she was a prostitute. Charges were dropped against Salih when he told the court that he killed the woman for the sake of the neighborhood's reputation. The students, struck with the injustice in this case, decide to reenact the case and try Salih one more time.

General release

The film opened in 51 screens across Turkey on at number thirteen in the Turkish box office chart with an opening weekend gross of $14,095.