Ben Hopkins has spent most of his career in film, creating award-winning features and documentaries, including
37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, a documentary about the Pamir Kirghiz, an Afghan tribe now living in Eastern Turkey (billed as a collaboration between the London film crew and the tribe in telling their history),
Welcome to Karastan, aka Lost in Karastan, a feature about a washed-up filmmaker attending the “world’s worst film festival” in the Republic of Karastan, and
Hasret-Yearning, in which filmmakers doing a documentary about the life of Istanbul (so low budget they travel by container ship from Berlin to Istanbul) turn toward the mysterious secretive side of the city. The films mix fact and fiction, slapstick and noir, gothic and satire. Not exactly the approach Hopkins takes in