“Meze on Main Street: A Love Story” Brings Tuckerbox to the Big Screen on March 5 at WRIF
White River Indie Festival (WRIF), March 1 through 8
Meze on Main Street: A Love Story is exactly that. It’s the story of how Jackie and Vural Oktay, proprietors of Tuckerbox, a Turkish restaurant that wraps around a corner of downtown White River Junction, met when they were young food service workers at the Mount Washington Hotel. It’s about their families, in places as disparate as small town Vermont and the cities of Turkey. And it’s about building a business and the calamity that threatened to sink it, and the shared tenacity of the Tuckerbox team and the Upper Valley community that ultimately saved the day.
Jim Zien took a course in documentary filmmaking from JAM’s (Junction Arts and Media) executive director Samantha Davidson Green. The film Meze on Main Street is his “first (and only) so far.” Why Tuckerbox? He and his wife, Helena Binder, had been enthusiastic patrons of the restaurant for some time. He explained:
“In addition, I had been taking my now 98 year-old aunt to lunch there weekly after moving her from New York City into the Village at WRJ, so we were friendly with Vural and Jackie as well as many of the day and evening servers. I'd always wondered about the origins of the restaurant and Little Istanbul [the Turkish emporium across the street from Tuckerbox, also owned by the Oktays], so when Samantha asked the course participants to do some trial filming for a prospective documentary I approached Vural and Jackie about the possibility and they graciously assented.”
Samantha Davidson Green, who edited Meze, described the film’s origin: ““Produce Your Personal Documentary” was the course I offered in 2022 through JAM in partnership with Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning at Dartmouth. I expected 3-5 minute films to come out of the 8-week soup-to-nuts workshop, but Jim’s curiosity about Tuckerbox led to a four-year journey.” Proximity of JAM offices to Tuckerbox and its newer, next-door counterpart, Cappadocia Cafe, was a good thing. “This familiarity and Jim’s persistence helped open layers to the story we never could have anticipated, reaching into the Oktays’ family histories and filming through the disastrous flood that struck our building, impacting us all together.”
“This project exemplifies the kind of hyper-local, relationship-based storytelling that we aim to catalyze at JAM.”—Executive Director Samantha Davidson Green
Full disclosure: Tuckerbox is my favorite Upper Valley lunch destination. And occasionally my breakfast spot, and sometimes the place for dinner. It’s my second living room, my unofficial office where I meet and talk with local artists for this very blog and other writings, a table where I hold hands with my husband and watch the trains arrive and depart. Many of your friends and neighbors who appear in the film feel the same. One customer speaking to the camera described Tuckerbox as “the hub of White River Junction.”
And fuller disclosure—just before I sat down to preview the film, I was gobsmacked to learn that I (and my husband) were in it! That final scene? It’s me congratulating Vural and Jackie on opening day at Cappadocia, Jackie kindly and carefully sliding a dessert into a paper bag for us to carry home.
Meze on Main Street: A Love Story will be screened at the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction at 12:00 noon on Thursday, March 5, 2026. Afterwards, you can purchase a separate ticket to meet and greet the film’s creative team and feed your body and soul at a luncheon at the Cappadocia Cafe just below. Tickets and further information available here.
Meze on Main Street is, of course, but one in a variety of offerings—films, live events, mix-and-mingles—at the White River Indie Festival, running from March 1 through March 8, 2026. Venues are primarily throughout downtown White River Junction. Here’s a peek at the schedule. Passes and individual tickets are available.
—————————————————
Thank you! You’re reading Artful, a blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley, and I hope you’ll subscribe (still free) and then share this post with your friends and on your social media. We now have over 3200 subscribers.
And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, Next Avenue, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.