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A family of languages,
heard on screen.
Discover the languages represented across TLFF films and the communities that carry them. From the Balkans to Siberia, the Turkic languages carry cinema of their own — some with a century of films behind them, some with a handful, some still waiting for their first.
Where the cinema is, and where it waits
Navigate the cultural geographies connected through the festival — across the Turkic world and its related landscapes. Steady gold marks a language with a body of film behind it. Pulsing white is a language still waiting for its first, and red where that language is itself endangered. Open blue rings are places whose cinema carries this heritage in another language altogether — hover any point to see which.
The empty places on this map are the reason it exists
Several languages here have almost no feature cinema at all. That absence is not a footnote to the atlas — it is the part of it we are trying to change. If you are making a film in one of these languages, the festival is looking for you.
The festival’s core. If the film speaks one of these languages, it belongs here — regardless of which country issued its passport.
Not in a Turkic language, but sharing its history, memory or communities. Kept clearly separate — the distinction is the point, not a technicality.
Our map is cultural as well as linguistic.
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Speaker figures are approximate and drawn from standard reference sources; production figures describe recent activity rather than exact annual counts. Corrections are welcome — this atlas is meant to be maintained, not finished.
This cinema is older than you would guess
The first camera turned in Baku two years after the Lumière brothers. Everything after that is one continuous story with long silences in it.