Antoine The Fortunate : At the Crossroads of Empires

The story of the rise and fall of the fortunes of Antoine Köpe and his Austro-Hungarian family. They witnessed the dramatic events leading to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of modern Turkey.

Antoine is an ordinary man, who has recorded his story in hundreds of hitherto unreleased home movies, photographs, drawings, audio recordings and letters from the early 20th century to the 1970s when he emigrated to the US. The film is a first-person account of the radical transformations brought about by the end of the age of empires and one man’s struggle to survive to find his place in a changing world.

100 years after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, this film is exceptionally relevant today, as it reminds us of a world that allowed multi-ethnic and faith-based societies to flourish.