Tag: Turkey

Dormitory (Yurt)

Posted on by Paul Risker

QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM VENICE

Director Nehir Tuna’s feature debut, Dormitory, opens in 1996, when tensions between religious and secular Turks were mounting. In the midst of the religious and political friction, fourteen-year-old Ahmet (Doğa Karakaş) has been sent by his father to a Yurt, to learn traditional Muslim values. Unbeknownst to his father (Tansu Biçer), Ahmet sneaks out to attend a secular school, a secret he guards from almost everyone. He even lies to the school bus driver, who drops him off outside a house where he pretends to live. From there, he discreetly returns to his dormitory at the Yurt, negotiating his place between two worlds.

Going into Dormitory, I wasn’t expecting to be skipping, singing and dancing afterwards, like I would if I’d watched Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly/ Stanley Donen, 1952). Nor did I want to. Dormitory’s appeal was that it would plough through the depths of oppressive anxiety, and explore how youth is a precarious, and potentially traumatising period in a person’s life. It’s a film that adequately meets these expectations, and without cynicism surrenders itself to the realisation that life is to be survived, and sometimes we have to either accept, or if we’re lucky, choose the hell we’re living.

This is an idea expressed by Ahmet’s only friend in the Yurt, Hakan (Can Bartu Arslan), who accepts that this might be the best place for him. With street smarts the wealthier Ahmet lacks, there’s a class interplay between the pair, that Tuna suggests more than he acts upon. Throughout the story, it’s a silent antagonist, stalking, waiting until it’s time to strike.

While I’ve offered a dark and oppressive appraisal thus far, Tuna’s film is not without joyous, rebellious and humorous moment, but the objective of this type of story is to oppress the audience with heavier emotions and themes. Despite moments of relief, Dormitory honours the anxiety and pain of one teenager’s yearning. It opens with a catchy albeit intrusive score, that, alongside the text that establishes the political and religious context, sounds an ominous warning of the dramatic storm that’s to come.

Tuna draws on personal experience, who, as a child, spent five years in what he describes as a “religious dormitory”, and this is likely why, throughout the story, we keenly feel the pressure Ahmet experiences. There’s a notable duality that contributes to his internalised and externalised pressure. While he wants to escape the Yurt, he tries to belong, maybe in part to placate his parents, and partly driven by the instinct to find communal belonging, even if it means compromising his identity and values.

Meanwhile, in the secular school, a potential romantic interest, Sevinç (Işıltı Su Alyanak), asserts how unsettling it is to think there’s a student amongst them who lives in a Yurt. The harsh nature of these words is added to by the affection the pair share – swapping presents, walking and talking in the school yard. Dormitory touches upon the idea of conformity, but also the complications in a fractured and adversarial society, where prejudicial hostility is rife.

Ahmet is the archetypal outsider, caught between two worlds – we must consider the question whether he can truly belong to either side, or must he walk his own path? The monochrome cinematography accentuates his experience of being caught in the shadows of religious and secular Turkey. It’s not merely an aesthetic choice, but one that connects with the substance of the story, which appears to be about Ahmet, but is it? The story may be as much about his father, who represents the insecurities and regrets of one generation that shapes the experiences of another generation. As his father says to him, “You are my redemption, my salvation.”

Dormitory is an incisive reflection on generational relationships, and despite being rich in themes and ideas, maybe Tuna missed an opportunity to explore these more thoroughly. However, I’d suggest Dormitory should be appreciated in an experiential context. The director, who is drawing off personal experiences, invites us into Ahmet’s space, to witness and experience the tumultuous society of mid-90s Turkey.

Instead of building a rigorous conversation around themes and ideas, it’s an experiential film. It lets us bear witness to an intimate yearning and anguish, but its strength is to avoid making any critical statements or answering any questions. Instead, Tuna prefers to leave his audience to resolve their feelings about the experience they’ve been privy to.

Dormitory has just had its World Premiere in the Orizzonti section of the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

Suna (Suna Kahevahel)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In a hotel room, sitting on two beds at right angles to each other, she says to him: “you won’t be too controlling, right? I don’t want anybody interfering with my life.” Then he sets out his own stall. “I’ll eat whatever you cook me,” he says. “When necessary, I’ll take a bath immediately.” You get the impression that that might not happen all that often.

Played by Turkish singing star Nurcan Eren, Suna craves the security of a relationship without any of the male domination that so often accompanies it. The man she has chosen, Veysel (Tarik Pabuccuoglu), has recently become a widower and wants a companion and partner in life. Not only that, he seems to want someone very like his former wife. He seems a kind, gentle man.

So they have an Imam wedding, a discreet Muslim ceremony with the local Imam present, which joins them in the eyes of Allah but may not have quite the same legal force as a regular marriage in Turkish society. For instance, if he dies, there’s no automatic legal provision that she gets the house.

With the help of the Veysel’s son Erol (Erol Babaoglu), Suna moves in to his house which is situated in a small, rural village. Veysel takes great delight in showing her his pair of caged budgies, which clearly mean a great deal to him.

She has worked as a cleaner and sets about cleaning up his house, which hasn’t been done for three years. A neighbour invites her to the local woman’s meeting, where you go along with a bit of money which Veysel, when asked, is happy to supply. But in the event, she goes out for a walk along the beach instead.

She enjoys walking outside, and on another occasion, when Erol is bringing the couple back from a shopping trip, she insists on being dropped off at the same place as Veysel and walking home alone. Walking home, a man hassles her, but fortunately another man comes to her rescue and sees him off. Her rescuer’s name is Can (Firat Tanış) , and they hit it off.

She seems to have more in common with Can than she does with Veysel, and often drops round to visit and chat with him. It turns out that he is a film critic, and in their conversation it emerges that she played parts as an extra in movies in Germany. She also visits a local restaurant bar, and one night stays there for sex with the owner, who, it turns out, has violent tendencies and likes inflicting pain on women during sex. It’s not clear whether Suna enjoys this, but given that she never goes back to the restaurant, one imagines not. She invents a cover story about being mugged on the way home from the women’s meeting earlier in the day to explain bruises on her face and neck.

As an independent, older woman in a deeply conservative society, Suna is in a difficult position: it doesn’t look like things are going to end well.

Fairly early on, a static image fills the cinema screen, a tapestry hanging on the wall with a picture of a peacock. On the soundtrack can be heard Veysel;s grunts and groans as he has sex with Suna. ‘With’ might be the wrong word: ‘to’ might be more accurate because we hear no noise emanating from her, the obvious assumption being that she is simply lying back as he takes his pleasure with no regard for hers. Aside from a shorter rerun of this scene, the other similar scene here is at the restaurant bar, where silhouettes of a rock band on a section of wall are shown while we hear the restaurant owner’s aural expressions of sexual enjoyment alongside Suna’s cries of discomfort and pain.

The sex scenes in this film are one of its great pleasures, although not in the way you might expect. All truly great directors reinvent the language of cinema and mould it to their own ends. Director Sezgin here has reinvented the cinematic grammar of the sex scene. It’s long worried me that actors and actresses (and more often than not, it seems to have been actresses, presumably because at least until recently, the vast majority of directors have been heterosexual men) have been required to expose their private parts to the camera and simulate coitus for it (and in rare cases, engage in actual coitus). I’m not being prudish about this, and I’m absolutely not talking about people’s personal behaviour outside of filming cinema, or morality, or anything like that – each to their own – but requiring actresses or actors to shoot sex scenes is, at least arguably, problematic. You shouldn’t be required to exposed yourself on the screen in that way, in my opinion.

Here, however, Sezgin has found an alternative way of portraying sex on camera without making any of those visual demands on her cast which works a treat (there’s a short clip of it in the trailer below, but when you watch the film, which unfolds at a very deliberate and measured pace, it has a greater impact than the little excerpt shown there). You could certainly argue that she’s borrowing heavily from the language of radio; sound, after all, is a significant component of cinema; I’d like to think that Orson Welles, in his Mercury Theatre on the Air days, would have been proud of her.

Also impressive is the portrayal of a film critic. I’ve seen this done in films before, but I’ve never seen a director get it right. On this occasion, however, I didn’t spot any gaffes, completely believed the character I saw on the screen and was delighted to have seen the film. (It’s not the primary reason I liked the film, and I realise this element is more likely to appeal to film critics than anyone else, but nevertheless, this element is a real pleasure.) The film is dedicated to the late Turkish film critic Cüneyt Cebenoyan.

I should add that personally, as a non-Turkish speaker unfamiliar with either the language or Turkish names, I didn’t immediately cotton on that the director was a woman – although looking at the movie’s subject matter about the plight of women of a very specific age in a very specific culture the fact of her gender would have been a reasonable guess. On one level I don’t care – it’s about whether a director is competent, has a vision and can realise it on the screen. If people can tick those boxes, I’m all for it – and if they happen to be women, then fine. Sezgin, in this film, ticks those boxes.

Given that half the humans on the planet are women, and that a good number of the rest of us humans are men who find women fascinating, the story ought to be of interest to a great many people. And it is so beautifully told, and the film so rigorously constructed and shot (on a minimal amount of resources, I might add) that it deserves to be widely seen. I can’t claim much knowledge of Turkish cinema, but Sezgin’s film reminded me of the poetic realism of the likes of English director Terence Davies (notably The Terence Davies Trilogy, 1983) and The Bill Douglas Trilogy (My Childhood, 1972; My Ain Folk, 1973; My Way Home, 1978, all directed by Scotland’s Bill Douglas).

There’s a similarity in the way these visual narratives are constructed via a series of small incidents to build up a compelling picture of the ordinary life of a character. Clearly Sezgin is a woman while these other two are men, so on some level her film is going to be very different from theirs. Yet, like these films by Davies and Douglas, Suna is a masterpiece.

Suna premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Zuhal

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Schrödinger’s cat might be rooted in ideas of quantum mechanics, but in popular culture it’s basically the idea of saying that something can’t be proven to either exist or not exist. In fact, it both exists and doesn’t exist at the same time! This conundrum is quizzically explored in Zuhal, where the film’s eponymous character (Nihal Yalçın) living in an apartment block is convinced that she can hear the meowing of a cat somewhere within its walls. The only problem is, no one else believes the cat even exists…

This is essentially a one-joke movie, thinly stretched out to feature length. Your mileage will vary on your love for cats and for the oddities of the film’s humour. Given that stray cats roam Istanbul with impunity — and are well beloved in Turkish culture — it’s no surprise that this type of story has emerged from the Eurasian nation. Elsewhere, Murakami, the patron saint of lost and mysterious cats, will be kicking himself he hasn’t written this first.

The cat can either be seen as a metaphor for Zuhal herself, who becomes increasingly more dogged (wink, wink) in her search for the mysterious feline, or as an excuse to explore the ins and outs of the unique apartment block. With rare exceptions, the vast majority of the film takes place within the building — covering block disputes, grating landlords, cabinets that can’t fit through walls, women who refuse to conform, and incredibly impetuous children. Credit must go to the production design, using simple photos, drawings, and furniture designs to give each individual room its own character.

At the centre is Nihal Yalçın, who comports herself and looks a little like Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, only without the severe breakdowns or asides to the camera, but still a fiercely independent woman and work-from-home lawyer who will stop at no end to make sure she uncovers the cat. Surrounded by a cast of self-absorbed, moody, obtuse neighbors, she is the both the sanest person around and the closest to a mental breakdown, Yalçın never quite giving us a true insight into how her character truly thinks.

To create a sense of semi-ironic distance, director Nazli Elif Durlu shoots medium-distance shots, often bifurcated by hallways and doors, with careful placing of furniture and characters. Shot on handheld, the frame is constantly moving, but only a little bit, making the viewer uneasy. While this type of idea could’ve got boring very quickly, this use of inventive framing and camerawork helps to keep things somewhat fresh.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but feel this would have been stronger and punchier as a short. At just under 90 minutes and the endlessly-explored basic premise needed to go somewhere else to be truly effective. But perhaps going elsewhere would ruin the joke. That said, I’m a dog person; maybe it’s all just a cat person thing.

Zuhal plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

Brother’s Keeper (Okul Tıraşı)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

If you like lording over people with less power than you, but you don’t have the tenacity to make it in the army, your second best bet is to work in a boarding school. After all, it’s easy to be a jobsworth when punishing children. Handled badly and these are unique, reactionary places that don’t have to operate like the rest of the world. For example, if there is a snowstorm, the nature of their self-sustaining community means that, while other children in the country can stay home, they will still have to soldier on and still go to all their classes.

This uniqueness has deadly consequences in the slow-burn drama Brother’s Keeper, set in a remote boarding school in the mountains of East Turkey. With temperatures in the winter dropping to minus 35 degrees, the special school for gifted Kurdish pupils becomes a literal danger zone, with students and teachers alike slowly succumbing to the bitter cold.

The students — who come from poor regions in the country — are told that they should actually count themselves lucky whilst lining up for reception in the freezing snow. Lucky enough to shower once a week, the chaos and embarrassment of their group wash is caught in tight frames by cinematographer Türksoy Gölebeyi. But when a few of the boys are caught messing around, one of the teachers punishes them by making them have cold showers.

The next day Yusuf (Samet Yıldız) wakes up to find that his friend Memo (Nurallah Alaca) can’t get out of bed. Much to his teacher’s annoyance, he begs them to take care of Memo, but to no avail. The teachers are far more caught up in pointless power plays of discipline, making the film feel like a Young Adult makeover of The Death of Mr Lazarescu. Once he finally gets the principal to realise that Memo is in bad shape, the school slowly deteriorates, with the petty priorities of the different teachers finally let loose on one another.

This drama is caught up in the wider context of the film, which plays as an allegory for Turkey’s relationship with the Kurdistan region, a large swathe of which intersects with the Eastern Anatolia Region. This is brought to the fore in a geography class, when a young boy is berated for saying they are actually living in a Kurdish part of the world. After a while, the school slowly resembles a type of colonial prison, escape impossible thanks to the endless pile-up of snow.

To keep this claustrophobic feel, we never physically leave the school, kept close in a 1.37:1 frame. The location is a real estate boarding school, which looks like it’s in desperate need of urgent repair. Combined with local community casting, Brother’s Keeper adheres to a realist style and execution, never losing sense of the wider message in the process, tastefully putting a spotlight on a people lacking both a country to call home or even a family to go home to.

My Brother’s Keeper played in the Panorama section of the 71st Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. Out in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. It also shows at the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.