A small girl in a long blue and white gingham dress finds herself in a magical land after a tornado hits her home and becomes friends with a lion, a scarecrow and a strange-looking tin man. The girl however is not Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale from the famous fantasy film "Wizard of Oz," but Ayşe (Zeynep Değirmencioğlu), the protagonist of "Little Ayşe and the Magic Dwarves in the Land of Dreams", a very close Turkish adaptation of the 1939 production.Taking its name from Yeşilçam Street in Beyoğlu, the epicenter of Turkish cinema from the 1960s to 1970s, the Yeşilçam era in Turkey was full of remakes of European, American and Indian movies, clearly explained in Cem Kaya's documentary "Remake, Remix, Rip-off." A filmmaker of Turkish origin from Berlin, Kaya embarked on a seven-year search for Yeşilçam movies and watched numerous films as well as interviewed producers, actors and film experts in Istanbul to find out how, in his own words, "copy culture" began.The large number of film productions in those years might seem highly promising, yet a handful of directors did not go beyond merely copying the scripts of Hollywood hits like "Rocky," "Star Wars," "The Exorcist," "Rambo," "Star Trek," "E.T." and "Superman," as the Yeşilçam industry suffered from financial constraints. Talking about "Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam" (The Man Who Saved the World), a 1982 fantasy film with unauthorized footage from "Star Wars," director Kunt Tulgar humorously explained how low budget films used to be produced at that time: "We stopped a motorcycle rider and confiscated his helmet [to use in the film]." In his recent interview in The Guardian newspaper, Kaya gave more ludicrous details about how necessary equipment was collected: "They borrowed reels from a local cinema, sliced out the bits they wanted and gave it back. Imagine the guys who sat down to watch 'Star Wars' in the cinema the next day, the tampered reels! It felt like revenge against the American wave of films sweeping through the capital's cinemas. He took from the rich and showed it to the poor."Another director, Çetin İnanç, further stressed in the documentary that American producers would not voluntarily give footage to them. Since Turkey had not yet recognized international copyright law, filmmakers used whatever story or piece of music they wanted, starting a period of Turkish B movies. The documentary shows a number of famous actors and walkers-on, such as Cüneyt Arkın, İhsan Gedik and İzzet Günay, who all appeared in hundreds of films in the hey-day of Yeşilçam era. The lack of proper film schools, laboratories, harsh censorship and adventurous and unsafe working standards are the next findings that viewers learn from the documentary.Although these filmmakers used to copy large chunks of Western hits, they were somewhat successful in integrating cultural elements in foreign productions, giving them a more Turkish character. Take the Turkish version of "Star Trek" as an example, which is still Sunday TV fun for families. Starring the late actor Sadri Alışık and directed by Hulki Saner in 1973, "Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda" (Tourist Ömer in the Star Trek), the final film in the eight-film "Turist Ömer" (Ömer the Tourist) series, duplicated and used footage from Star Trek's first episode, "The Man Trap." Everything is almost the same as in the sci-fi TV series except the inclusion of Ömer, a poor but funny man traveling in space with the crew. "Yeşilçam's model was Hollywood," said another interviewee in Kaya's documentary, sounding quite right. The Turkish "E.T." called "Badi," "Kara Şimşek" (Rocky), "Şeytan" (The Exorcist) and "Drakula Istanbul'da" are some other examples remade for Turkish audience with a local taste.Making its debut at the Locarno Film Festival, Kaya's documentary was previously screened at Istanbul Modern's "One Hundred Years of Love" exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of Turkish cinema and the 20th edition of Gezici Film Festival. This month it won a special audience award in Dokufest, an international short film and documentary festival that took place in Kosovo for the 14th time Aug. 8 to Aug. 16. "Remake, Remix, Rip-off" truly celebrates how the Turkish film industry developed over many years from bizarre Turkish versions of Hollywood movies and romantic stories of the quintessential poor boy and wealthy girl to the films of acclaimed directors such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Kaan Müjdeci, Fatih Akın and Ferzan Özpetek, who return home with awards from prestigious film festivals in Venice, Cannes or Berlin.