Hot Shots 2023: Acelya Kancelik

In her first year as a full-time assistant editor, Acelya Kancelik has worked back-to-back on five factual shows for the BBC, Channel 4, Amazon and Netflix.

It’s an impressive start for Kancelik, who studied and worked as a director in Turkey before coming to the UK, finding her feet by winning places on both the Grierson DocLab editing programme and Sheffield DocFest’s Amplify Talent programme.

One senior figure whom Kancelik has impressed is Lizzie Gillett, head of documentaries at Misfits Entertainment.

She says: “I trust Acelya’s taste and story instincts as much as any senior producer, and I often seek out her advice and suggestions on my documentary projects.”

Kancelik’s first challenge was to sift through reams of performance footage for Passion Pictures/Wild Sheep Content/Brown Munde Inc’s This is AP Dhillon, a four-part Amazon Prime ob-doc series centred on the breakout Punjabi hip-hop star.

She followed this with another Amazon series, 72 Films’ Newcastle United, plus BBC Studios’ BBC2 doc Empire Of Erdogan, October Films’ C4 doc My Name Is Happy and Curious Films’ Netflix commission Fertility Fraudster.

Fertility Fraudster series producer Kathryn Taylor found Kancelik to be a “natural collaborator who listens to all the voices in the room”. She adds: “Acelya brings clarity of thinking to complex storylines, and her insights are fresh, unexpected and nuanced. She has a natural warmth and humour, which enables her to find the human heart in a subject or contributor, and this makes her editorial approach both genuine and incisive.”