Aslihan Unaldi

Aslihan Unaldi is a filmmaker born and raised in Istanbul. In September 2021 she directed her feature debut, Afloat, in southern Turkey, which is set to premiere in the fall of 2023. She is currently working on a documentary about the Turkish erotic film industry in the 1970s.

Razan, Aslihan's award-winning student short, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2006, and her feature documentary Overdrive at the Istanbul Film Festival in 2011. Both films went on to screen at dozens of international film festivals. In 2015 she spent several months on the Syrian-Turkish border filming Syrian freedom fighters. The resulting video installation, Bordersongs, was exhibited at the prestigious art institution Angewandte in Vienna. Aslihan was a writer on Young Wrestlers (Berlinale, 2016), and Skate Kitchen (Sundance, 2018, distributed by Magnolia).

Aslihan's work has been supported and funded by the Tribeca Film Institute, Netflix, Topic, Film Independent, Sloan Foundation, the World Resources Institute, New York Women in Film and TV, and others. She currently teaches screenwriting in the graduate film programs of New York University and Columbia University. She holds an MFA in film from NYU’s Tisch School of Arts and a dual BA in photography and international studies from Yale University.