BAHARAT, which means Spices in Turkish and Hindi, will be my second feature. Like every other great film, it will be a timely piece that will take a picture of modern American society, specifically Arlington here and now with its rapid urbanization and housing problems, but also a timeless art because it will deal with humanity's fundamental issues like family, friendship, ambition, greed, love, lust, price we pay for freedom and of course the American Dream. God is Bored, our first feature was our film school, which we shot through many difficulties, limitations, obstacles and challenges, and we did it for the sake of Art. But with our second film, Baharat, based on a very tight and concise script with a clearly defined 3 act structure I wrote over six years ago, doing more than a hundred drafts and featuring a very diverse international cast, I will pursue a major commercial success and a global landmark artistic achievement, hopefully making its debut at the Sundance Film Festival.

Baharat will be a Michelin-starred restaurant that will infuse the Indian and Turkish cuisines and, by doing so, reinterpret, enrich, and modernize Mediterranean and Mesopotamian food and serve it in a majestic decor. The idea of opening Baharat came to me when I was a waiter at Rasika, America's best Indian Restaurant, according to many, where I discovered the power of spices and how they elevate dishes to levels of divinity by adding many layers. When I applied these spices, like turmeric, coriander, fennel, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, fenugreek, etc, to my own food, the result was fantastic, magical, and mystical. But only during the writing of Baharat as a script for my second feature film did it dawn on me that infusing Turkish and Indian cuisines was an utterly original restaurant concept.

My third feature film, "Love is.." takes its name from a Sufi poet, Seyh Galip, who once recited: " Love is all there is, the rest is a hearsay". It will be an epic love story buried deep inside an international spy thriller. The script is based on my novel in Turkish, Muhbir. I took the characters from Muhbir on a whirlwind tour of the globe, ending in Washington, D.C. It will be a highly artistic film in the style of major Asian auteurs, which hopefully will make its debut where else, at the Cannes Film Festival, the mecca of world cinema.

It has been a long dream of mine to bring a major film festival to Ballston, my home since the first day I came to the USA in 2000. Not just any film festival, mind you, but Urban Film Festival, which will showcase beautiful films from all around the world that have been shot in major metropolises and deal with urban issues, like traffic, crime, homelessness, housing, gentrification, diversity, pollution and many other problems and joys of living in big cities. We could add the Institute of Urbanization to the mix along with the film festival and invite scholars from around the world to give talks on that year's theme, but let's cross that bridge when we get to it.

Maqamat will be an eight-episode, one-season, scripted, hour-long prestige drama for one of the streaming giants, which will examine the dissolution of a conservative couple's marriage in modern society and what capitalism does to traditional institutions and religious values. Maqamat is a plural of Maqam, which means musical scale in Oriental music, so each episode of this show will be in a different maqam with its corresponding tones, notes, modulations and intonations. For example, the first episode will be Nihavent. Nihavent Maqam is slower in pace and usually associated with melancholy and sadness, so the entire episode's color palette, shots, editing, and pacing will be on the same musical scale as Nihavent. The second episode will be in Rast, the third will be in Hijaz, and so forth; thus, the tone of each episode will reflect the characteristics of the melodies of its Maqam.

Ahmet will be an hour-long scripted prestige drama that will dive deep into the life and times of legendary music producer Ahmet Ertegün. As the son of a Turkish Ambassador in Washington D.C. during the nineteen forties, Ahmet discovers jazz and blues, frequents the music halls in the Nation's Capital and listens to the likes of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday, even holds jam sessions for black musicians at the embassy during the height of segregation, drawing the ire of many U.S. politicians. Later, he founded Atlantic Records and discovered and recorded Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Led Zeppelin, and many other now-imitable singers and musicians. And by doing so, he singlehandedly made what jazz and blues are in America today. Ahmet, the show will be two seasons with eight episodes each season. The first season will be black and white and take place in Washington DC, where Ahmet frequented smoke-filled music halls and clubs along 14th street during the forties. The second season will be in color and cover his later years as a music mogul in New York City, discovering and recording many now iconic musicians and partying with the who-is-who of Rock'n Hall of Music of Fame in Studio 54.