Ackland Film Forum: “The Man Who Saved the World” (1982)

We kick off our Global Cult Cinema series with the sci-fi/martial arts/fantasy film known as Turkish Star Wars.

The Man Who Saved the World
Çetin İnanç, Turkey, 1982, 1h 31m

FILM SYNOPSIS

Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World) is an otherwise obscure Turkish Science Fantasy Martial Arts film from 1982 directed by Çetin İnanç and written by and starring Cüneyt Arkın, that’s better known in certain Internet circles for being So Bad, It’s Good. It’s more commonly known in these circles as “Turkish Star Wars“, because it lifts much of its Stock Footage directly from Star Wars.

TICKETS

Free tickets available at the Varsity Theatre, 123 E. Franklin St.

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ABOUT THE GLOBAL CULT CINEMA SERIES

From Rocky Horror Picture Show to The Big Lebowski, cult classics are movies that become objects of adulation for their most dedicated fans. While some cult classics are good movies by conventional standards, others are famous precisely because the director was more interested in having a good time than winning awards. In this series, we’ll show four global cult classics (or soon to-be classics), including Çetin İnanç’s 1982 science-fiction action film Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (“The Man Who Saved the World”), which infamously “borrowed” special effects sequences from Star Wars and Lo Wei’s 1972 film The Big Boss, which made Bruce Lee an international star. Tears of the Black Tiger pays homage to Thai action films and melodramas of the 1950s, crossing that indelible line between reverence and parody. Om Shanti Om also pays tribute to a golden era of filmmaking, only in this case it’s concerned with recreating the over-the-top dance numbers of 1970s Bollywood filmmaking.

The Spring 2022 Global Cult Cinema series, co-organized by the Ackland Art Museum and the Film Studies Program in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, is presented in connected with an installation in Ackland Upstairs, the Museum’s second floor gallery featuring short term displays of works being used in conjunction with university classes. This semester, visitors can find examples of posters from the Ackland’s collection on display for Research Methods in Film Studies: Histories of Moviegoing.