A film award usually belongs to the world of applause, premieres and professional recognition. Hazar Ergüçlü’s moment at the 33rd Adana Golden Koza Film Festival took a very different turn. After winning Best Actress for Alphan Eşeli’s MUTTER: Bir Annenin Hatıra Defteri, the actress used the stage to speak about a grieving child, the human cost of mining disasters and the memories carried by families who have worked underground.
Her remarks quickly became one of the most discussed moments of the festival. The reason was not celebrity drama or a carefully polished acceptance line. It was the uncomfortable honesty of an actress accepting a major career honor while acknowledging that another family was living through an immeasurable loss.
Hazar Ergüçlü Wins Best Actress at Adana Golden Koza
The 33rd International Adana Golden Koza Film Festival concluded its 2026 program with the national feature competition awards. Ergüçlü received the Best Actress prize for her performance in MUTTER: Bir Annenin Hatıra Defteri, a film written and directed by Alphan Eşeli.
MUTTER: Bir Annenin Hatıra Defteri had already attracted international attention before its Turkish festival appearance. It premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Festival in New York in the Escape from Tribeca selection and was later selected for the main competition at the 59th Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival.
Yet the speech shifted the focus away from career success and toward a much heavier reality.
“I Am Ashamed of the Breath I Take”
Ergüçlü referred to Yaşar, the 13-year-old son of miner Kerim Ören, who died in a mine collapse in Soma. Reports from the ceremony said Yaşar had remained beside his father’s coffin during the funeral, an image that deeply affected the actress.
Ergüçlü’s response was stark. She said she felt ashamed of living and breathing while seeing mining families suffer, and she apologized to Yaşar for being able to do little beyond mentioning his pain from an award stage.
That statement matters because it did not present celebrity as a solution. Ergüçlü did not claim that an acceptance speech could repair a broken family. Instead, she openly confronted the limits of public attention. A famous person can speak, but words cannot replace a lost father.
That tension gave the moment its emotional force.
A Family Connection Made the Tragedy Personal
The actress also explained why mining deaths affect her so strongly. She said her grandparents were workers and that her family had connections to coal and mining work. She described childhood memories shaped by the smell of coal and recalled her grandfather working in a copper mine.
This detail changed the tone of the speech. Ergüçlü was not speaking about miners as a distant social category. She was connecting the tragedy to the labor history of her own family.
That personal connection also explains the unusual mix of grief, anger and guilt in her remarks. She described the pain as something she could not simply put aside. Her questions about injustice were therefore broader than one accident. They asked what kind of society accepts repeated loss as something people must simply endure.
Why the Golden Koza Speech Struck Such a Nerve
Award speeches often follow a familiar rhythm: gratitude, recognition, colleagues, family and a final message. Ergüçlü disrupted that pattern. She used a moment of personal success to acknowledge someone else’s suffering.
The speech also exposed a difficult contradiction in entertainment culture. Film festivals celebrate creativity, ambition and individual achievement, but they exist within societies dealing with economic pressure, workplace danger and unequal risk. Ergüçlü brought those two realities into the same room.
Her words were especially striking because she did not pretend to have an easy answer. She questioned whether people can continue living with injustice and asked whether Yaşar’s suffering carries a responsibility for the wider public. Instead of ending with certainty, she ended by holding on to hope.
The Film Behind the Award
The significance of the moment should not erase the film itself. MUTTER: Bir Annenin Hatıra Defteri is an ambitious psychological horror and drama directed by Alphan Eşeli, with Ergüçlü in the central role. Its international festival journey, from Tribeca to Sitges and then Adana, positioned it as one of the notable Turkish independent productions of 2026.
Ergüçlü’s Best Actress win therefore represents both an individual acting achievement and a wider moment for Turkish cinema on the festival circuit. Her performance earned the jury’s recognition, while her acceptance speech gave the evening a social and human dimension that reached far beyond the competition results.
A Speech That Will Be Remembered for Its Conscience
Hazar Ergüçlü’s Golden Koza speech is unlikely to be remembered simply as another award acceptance. Its lasting power comes from the collision of celebration and grief.
She stood on a stage built to honor cinema, yet chose to make space for a child mourning his father. She spoke about her own family’s labor history, questioned the normalization of injustice and still refused to surrender hope.
That balance is what made the moment resonate. The speech did not offer a solution to a mining tragedy. It offered something smaller but meaningful: attention, remembrance and a refusal to look away.
For an actress receiving one of Turkey’s major film honors, that may have been the most human way to use the microphone.
Final Thought
Hazar Ergüçlü’s Golden Koza speech proved that an award can become more than a celebration of personal success. By remembering Yaşar and speaking about her own family’s connection to mining, she brought attention to the human stories behind workplace tragedies. Her words were painful, honest and deeply personal a reminder that sometimes the most powerful use of a public platform is simply to refuse to look away.
SOURCE: Birsen Altuntas, Adana Golden Koza Film Festival, IMDB
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