The Bandit

The Bandit (Eşkıya, 1996) is a Turkish crime drama you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by Yavuz Turgul. Şener Şen plays Baran, a mountain outlaw who walks out of prison after thirty-five years and finds that his entire world has been swallowed by a reservoir. His village is gone. The woman he loved, Keje, was taken by a man who then handed Baran to the police.

He travels to Istanbul to settle both debts. The city is nothing like the mountains — all concrete, noise and strangers who have no use for a man who still lives by a code of honour. On the streets he picks up Cumali (Uğur Yücel), a young small-time hustler with his own reasons to be angry. They make an unlikely pair, bound together less by friendship than by a shared sense of displacement. The film weaves revenge, betrayal and a quietly devastating love story without letting any one thread go slack.

One of the highest-grossing Turkish films of the 1990s, The Bandit helped redefine what local genre cinema could look like — grounded, unhurried, built around performance. Şener Şen's Baran carries every scene on decades of weathered dignity. Stream The Bandit (1996) online on iFILM.