Sohbet Baylyyev runs two of the most-watched cinema accounts on Instagram and edits for productions at the same time, a split practice that puts him at the center of three of the most active debates in Turkish film: what counts as film education in a feed-first era, how open-source AI editing tools will reshape an editor’s day, and whether the country’s new LED stages can keep pace with demand.
“My history within the film industry began when I started studying cinema at university,” Baylyyev told Film Daily in a recent interview, sketching the path that took him from student sets and extra work to two Instagram pages whose combined reach now sits around 621,000 followers. The two accounts look like fan projects from the outside. He treats them as a production pipeline that runs parallel to his paid editing work, and that parallel track is the part most readers miss.
A Filmmaker Working Both Sides of the Frame
Baylyyev is a filmmaker and video editor by trade. He studied cinema at university and built his early credits on student projects and work as an extra on professional sets, a route that put him in the room while directors and crew turned scripts into shots. He calls the experience of being on those sets foundational, the kind that turned theory into rhythm.
From there he built two side projects that grew well past hobby scale. Cinema Perspective carries 523,000 followers on Instagram under the bio line “Good movies broaden your horizons!” Cinema POV, run separately as @cinemapov, carries 98,000 followers and bills itself as “Best Scenes, Acting Performances and Parallelisms in Cinema!” The combined audience is roughly 621,000, and the editorial logic behind both feeds is what sets them apart from a typical reposting account.
What 621,000 Followers Actually Watch
Baylyyev is open about what he picks. He highlights emotional climaxes, the breakup scene or the moment of victory that hits viewers in the gut. He looks for visual storytelling, where the image carries the scene without dialogue doing the heavy lifting. He leans into scenes that challenge the viewer, non-linear cuts, taboo subjects, experimental editing that pushes against standard pacing.
What sends a scene viral, in his reading, comes down to five factors he names in the interview: relatability, visual appeal, timing, nostalgia, and education. A scene that taps a universal feeling earns shares. A scene that lands visually earns stops. A scene tied to a trending actor or film earns a timing boost. A scene tied to a memory of childhood cinema earns emotional reach. And an educational post, his chronological edit of every Oscar-winning performance from the first ceremony forward, earns saves.
The pages also show the work behind the work. He pairs finished scenes with behind-the-scenes footage to show how a shot was built, a small editorial choice that doubles as a film class. The output is what happens when a working editor treats an Instagram page as a portfolio instead of a feed.
- Emotional climaxes that land in the gut
- Visual storytelling where the image carries the scene
- Experimental or non-linear scenes that challenge conventions
- Behind-the-scenes footage paired with the finished scene
- Educational chronologies like his Oscar-winners series
The Editor’s Three-Firsts
Once raw footage lands on his timeline, Baylyyev runs through a sequence he returns to on every project. He organizes and labels every clip before he touches a cut, then watches the footage through to find the story it actually carries, then audits technical quality, color, lighting, and sound, so the final product reads as polished. The order is deliberate: organization first because editing without a clean folder structure is guessing.
The larger question behind that discipline is what AI does to it. Baylyyev is cautious in public about machine tooling, and his framing has become the working line for many editors weighing the same trade-offs.
It’s important to note that while AI can be a valuable tool for video editing, it’s not a replacement for human creativity and expertise. Ultimately, the best results will come from a balance of both AI and human input.
He has not built his own pipeline around AI tools, and he is clear that he sees automation as a way to take repetitive work off the desk, not as a way to skip the creative judgment that turns raw footage into a scene. The three-firsts still hold; what shifts is which steps a machine can shoulder.
The Turkish Films He Calls Required Viewing
When Baylyyev lists Turkish films for international viewers, he starts with Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the slow-cinema director whose long takes and introspective character studies have carried Turkish cinema to global stages for two decades. Ceylan’s 2023 Cannes entry About Dry Grasses won Merve Dizdar the festival’s Best Actress prize, the most recent data point in a filmography that already included Uzak, Winter Sleep, and the Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep in 2014.
Ceylan’s pace is slow; his reach is global. His next feature, Pale Sun (Turkish title Yorgun Güneş), begins principal photography this summer with Cannes 2027 in its sights, per a March 17, 2026 report on Ceylan’s Pale Sun summer shoot plan. The plot centers on Sabri, who lives alone in the suburbs of Ankara, and a daughter based in Istanbul, a return to the father-daughter territory Ceylan has mined before.
Baylyyev points viewers next to Yol (1982), co-directed by Yılmaz Güney and Şerif Gören, the prison-leave drama that shared the Palme d’Or that year, and to Süt (Milk, 2008), Semih Kaplanoğlu’s quiet film about a boy processing his father’s disappearance. He also names Mustang (2015), Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s coming-of-age story of five sisters in a conservative Turkish village. Each is a different entry point into the same national cinema: one that has produced festival winners for four straight decades and is now layering virtual production and AI tools on top of that base.
The LED Stage Arrives in Istanbul
Turkish cinema is no longer just a festival story. The country’s first virtual production studio is now open for business, and it has already been used to shoot the car interiors for the country’s first car-chase action feature, ANKA. The film is directed by Süleyman Mert Özdemir, and the virtual production work was delivered by MGX Studio in Istanbul, the same facility that has handled previous projects for Netflix and the Turkish production house Autonomy.
The MGX team captured photogrammetry and plate shots at every real-world location the script called for, including one of Istanbul’s busiest streets, then rebuilt the venues in Unreal Engine with time-of-day lighting and texture, and mapped the plates onto an LED video wall powered by disguise vx 1 and vx 2 media servers. The crew shot stationary car interiors on the stage with a Sony Venice camera, framing angles and actor reactions against a moving backdrop. The detailed planning meant the virtual production was completed in a single day, per a case study of Turkey’s first car-chase feature shot on an LED stage.
The shoot also integrated Zeiss Master Anamorphic lenses with the disguise system for the first time, the kind of integration work that travels with a studio once it has been done. The supporting kit list tells the same story of build-out: Unilumin Upad III LED panels, Brompton Tessera SX40 processing, and Mo-Sys StarTracker camera tracking. Müşvik Guluzade is the studio owner and producer, Fatih Eke is CTO and studio manager, and Mete Mümtaz coordinated the virtual production operations. As more international productions scout Istanbul LED stages, the same crew is positioned to take the work that follows.
The AI Question Hitting Every Editor’s Desk
“I haven’t used AI that much,” Baylyyev told Film Daily, and his caution matches what most working editors actually do in 2026. The tool that pulled the conversation into the open is VOID, short for Video Object and Interaction Deletion, an open-source model released on April 3, 2026, by Netflix Research in collaboration with INSAIT at Sofia University, per the INSAIT-Netflix VOID model announcement.
VOID does not just erase objects from a video. It models the physics of what happens after the object is gone. Remove a car from a two-vehicle collision and the surviving car keeps moving down an empty road, debris replaced by intact asphalt, smoke cleared, and shadows re-rendered. The model is built on Alibaba’s CogVideoX-Fun-V1.5-5b-InP, uses Meta’s SAM2 for object segmentation and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro for scene analysis, and was trained on synthetic paired data from Google’s Kubric and HUMOTO datasets.
- Released on April 3, 2026
- Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face
- 64.8% preference over six rivals in a 25-participant study
- Leading commercial alternative Runway scored 18.4%
The peer-reviewed status is open: the research has not yet gone through peer review, the model needs a 40GB or higher VRAM GPU to run, and Netflix has not announced any integration into existing production pipelines. For an editor like Baylyyev, the practical read is that AI tooling will keep eating the repetitive end of the work, organizing footage, rough-cutting, removing unwanted objects, while the storytelling decisions, where to cut, what to keep, what to drop, stay human.
What Comes Next for a Filmmaker Who Won’t Sit Still
Baylyyev is also working on two adjacent projects that don’t show up on the feeds. He is exploring blockchain technology for content distribution, where decentralized ledgers could give independent filmmakers a funding and royalty split that doesn’t run through the usual gatekeepers. He is also tracking the metaverse as an interactive storytelling medium, an idea that sounds speculative but is starting to ship small pilots at conferences throughout 2026.
The industry backdrop he is reading from is not static either. The 79th Cannes Film Festival closed with Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord taking the Palme d’Or, his second after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, with Park Chan-wook presiding over a jury that included Demi Moore, Ruth Negga, Laura Wandel, Chloé Zhao, Diego Céspedes, Isaach De Bankolé, Paul Laverty, and Stellan Skarsgård, per the full list of 2026 Cannes winners. The Grand Prix went to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, and the Best Director prize was split between Los Javis for La Bola Negra and Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland.
Baylyyev’s next thesis, whether blockchain distribution lands or whether a metaverse proof of concept ships, will be judged by the wallet activity that follows it, the same test he has applied to the films he champions. The pages and the practice will keep running in parallel.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Sohbet Baylyyev?
Sohbet Baylyyev is a Turkish filmmaker and video editor who studied cinema at university, worked on student sets and as an extra on professional productions, and now runs two of the largest cinema-focused Instagram accounts while taking on editing work.
What are Cinema Perspective and Cinemapov?
Cinema Perspective (@cinema_perspective) is a 523,000-follower Instagram page running under the tagline “Good movies broaden your horizons!” Cinema POV (@cinemapov) is a separate 98,000-follower account focused on best scenes, acting performances, and parallelisms in cinema.
What Turkish films does Baylyyev recommend as required viewing?
He names Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s filmography first, then points viewers to Yol (1982, co-directed by Yılmaz Güney and Şerif Gören), Süt (Milk, 2008, directed by Semih Kaplanoğlu), and Mustang (2015, directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven).
What is VOID and how does it affect video editors?
VOID (Video Object and Interaction Deletion) is an open-source model released on April 3, 2026, by Netflix Research with INSAIT at Sofia University. It removes objects from video and rebuilds the surrounding physics; in a 25-participant preference study it was chosen 64.8% of the time against six commercial alternatives, with Runway scoring 18.4%.
What is Baylyyev working on next?
Baylyyev is exploring blockchain-based content distribution as a way to give independent filmmakers decentralized funding and royalty splits, and tracking the metaverse as an interactive storytelling medium, both framed as exploratory rather than shipped products.
