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Gazelle in the classroom

A guide for faculty and discussion leaders. It is meant to be used after watching the film, and it does not give away the ending.

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The film in brief

Yakup, a Turkish music teacher, seeks asylum in New York after political upheaval forces him to leave his country. Separated from his wife and daughter, he must choose between waiting years for legal family reunification and risking illegal routes to bring them to safety. As he works multiple jobs to save money, prolonged uncertainty begins to erode his perception of time, his relationships and his psychological stability.

To cite: Gazelle. Directed by Nadir Sarıbacak and Samy Pioneer. Written by Ayhan Hulagu and Nadir Sarıbacak. Roaring Cat Films, 2025. 100 min. English and Turkish, with English subtitles.

Where the story comes from

In 2016, Nadir Sarıbacak was an award-winning actor in Turkey, known for Winter Sleep, the Palme d’Or winner, and for Ivy, which premiered at Sundance. That year, during a short family trip to the United States, the attempted coup in Turkey changed everything. He learned he had been blacklisted at home, and the family stayed. For years he worked part-time jobs, from driving for Uber to deliveries, while trying to find his way back to acting.

When no one was calling, he called his friend Ayhan Hulagu, a New York-based actor, writer and director, and said they should write a story themselves. The script grew out of what they and the people around them had lived through. At one point they were given a voice recording of a girl speaking to her father, who had been arrested in Turkey. “You’re a liar,” she tells him. “You will not come back again.” That recording, Ayhan has said, is when they knew the script had to hold on to real life.

Themes

WaitingThe film treats waiting not as a pause but as a condition people live inside. Time stretches, plans dissolve, and the present becomes hard to hold.
The absent familyYakup’s wife and daughter are never seen. The audience, like Yakup, has to imagine them. As Nadir puts it, a friend once told him that his father had become “like an application” on his phone.
Sound and the sensesYakup is a music teacher, and the film is built around what he hears. Nadir has described his own first years in the US as a time when every sound felt like too much.
Work, status and dignityAn educated professional takes whatever work he can find. The film looks at what that does to a person’s sense of who they are.
Trauma and responseThe writers set out to ask how someone responds to trauma while it is happening, and what that response reveals about them.

Discussion questions

Sociology and migration studies
  1. How does the film show the gap between being legally present and feeling settled? Where does Yakup belong, and to whom?
  2. Who are the people around Yakup in New York? Where do they help him, and where do they fall short?
Psychology and social work
  1. How does prolonged uncertainty change Yakup’s sense of time? Which scenes make that change visible?
  2. What coping strategies does Yakup use, and what do they cost him?
Law, human rights and public policy
  1. How does the film show the asylum and immigration system: through institutions, or through its effects on one man’s days? What does that choice make visible?
  2. Where does the film place the line between legality and morality? Do you agree with where it puts that line?
Film and media studies
  1. The wife and daughter are never shown. How does this absence shape the way we watch Yakup?
  2. How does the sound design put us inside Yakup’s head? Compare it with the way the city is shown.
Political science and history
  1. How does political upheaval in one country show up in the daily life of a man in another?
  2. How much does a viewer need to know about Turkish politics to follow Yakup? What does the film gain by centering his experience rather than the events behind it?

Read alongside it

SociologyCecilia Menjívar, “Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 4 (2006). On living for years in uncertain legal status.
AnthropologyGhassan Hage, ed., Waiting (Melbourne University Publishing, 2009). Essays on waiting as a social and existential condition.
Political sociologyJavier Auyero, Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina (Duke University Press, 2012). How making people wait becomes a form of power.
Film studiesHamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001). The tradition of films made by exiled and diasporic filmmakers.
Literature and theoryEdward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2000). A classic essay on what exile does to a person.

Take action

Many audiences leave the film asking what they can do. A few places to start:

International Rescue CommitteeHelps refugees and displaced people rebuild their lives, in the US and around the world.
European Council on Refugees and ExilesAn alliance of organizations working for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers across Europe.
Action NCCommunity organizing in North Carolina, including immigrant justice. Its Immigrant Justice Director joined the Charlotte conversation.
Amnesty InternationalCampaigns for the rights of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants worldwide.
Close to homeLook up the resettlement agency, legal aid clinic or immigrant center in your own city. Most need volunteers, interpreters and mentors.

Tell your story

After almost every screening, someone stands up and tells their own story. A man in Amsterdam remembered being sent away from Indonesia at ten. In Brussels, a young woman recognized her father’s guilt in Yakup. In Washington, D.C., a young filmmaker who arrived at twelve said the film finally helped him understand his parents. If the film brings back a story of your own, we would be glad to hear it at info@gazellefilm.com.

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