A mayoral race, a water crisis, and an outsider prosecutor with a target on his back collide in Burning Days, a slow-burn thriller set in a small Turkish town that would rather bury its problems than face them.
What is Burning Days about?
Emre arrives in a drought-stricken provincial town as its newly appointed state prosecutor, an outsider whose job is to enforce law that local power structures have long since learned to route around. A sinkhole opening in the town square becomes a visible symbol of what is rotting underneath the surface, and Emre's early investigations put him on a collision course with the networks of loyalty, money, and silence that run the place. When a young local woman is attacked, the case exposes how far the town's elite will go to protect their own, and Emre finds himself isolated, watched, and increasingly unsure who around him can be trusted as the approaching mayoral election raises the stakes on every side. Director Emin Alper builds dread out of small-town geography — dry riverbeds, half-built structures, rooms where decisions get made before anyone official is consulted — and lets the heat and the drought work as a constant pressure on every scene. The film keeps its focus tight on Emre's growing isolation rather than spectacle.
About the cast
Selahattin Paşalı leads as the prosecutor Emre, with Ekin Koç, Erol Babaoğlu, Erdem Şenocak, Selin Yeninci, Sinan Demirer, Nizam Namidar, and Ali Seçkiner Alıcı filling out the town's officials, allies, and adversaries.
Context & significance
Burning Days is a multi-country co-production spanning Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, and Turkey, directed by Emin Alper. It premiered in 2022 to strong critical notice on the festival circuit, earning a place among the year's more talked-about entries in the small-town political thriller tradition alongside films that use a single local crisis to expose wider institutional rot.
Watching Burning Days on Ktime
Burning Days is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so its dialogue-heavy, tension-driven story reads clearly for Farsi-speaking audiences. A free K-Time account login is needed to stream it; this page itself can be read without logging in.