Tag: Turkish

Girl with no Mouth (Peri)

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

In his third feature film, Turkish director Can Evrenol moved away from adult horror into partially new territory: children’s horror/fantasy. Peri (Denizhan Akbaba) lives with her father in a house in the woods. She has no mouth, literally. She drinks liquid through her nose and injects solids through a tube attached to her stomach. One day, her uncle Kemal shows uninvited and kills her father and dog. Peri runs into the woods and joins a group of three boys around her age, who call themselves “the Pirates”.

Kemal works for “the Corporation”, an elusive organisation that’s somehow responsible for the apocalypse that has befallen the region. We never learn the details of what happened, yet we do know that Kemal is intent on killing his niece and the other three boys. The four children were born with deformities. One of boys has no eyes, the other has no ears and third one has no nose. They rely on each other for the senses that they do not possess. For example, the no-eyed boy depends on others for vision. Peri relies on her friends for speech. And so on. The foursome must stick together in order to survive.

They come across abandoned buildings and vehicles, in what looks like a civilisation nearing its extinction. They must keep on moving in order to evade Kemal and his thugs, and also in search of food. They enter a large mansion and come across a rifle-toting formidable old lady. Maybe she isn’t as menacing as she seems. Could she become some sort of motherly figure and join them on their crusade against their evil hunters?

Not all is doom and gloom. There are touching elements of solidarity and an important message of tolerance, reminding children that they must support each other despite their differences. These differences are not a handicap. In fact, they complement each other. And no disability makes you a human being of lesser value.

The Girl with no mouth is indeed constructed as a children’s movie. The Manichæan battle of good versus bad, with a very simplified plot. The didactic message of tolerance and diversity. A child’s adventure: pirate clothes, slingshots and swords. And as such it’s more likely to rivet and enthral little human beings. Those under 12 years of age will likely holler as our four juvenile heroes contend with the malevolent adults attempting to kill them. Grown-ups less so, even if the movie is still enjoyable enough to watch.

Girl with no Mouth has just premiered in Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. A very unusual selection, normally reserved for specialist festivals and festival strands.

Meteors (Meteorlar)

Posted on by victorfraga

How do you mix deadly politics with the wonders of nature? In Meteors, documentarist Gurcan Keltek combines a mostly unknown and obscure – yet no less tragic – political event that took place three years ago in Anatolia with a succession of superb natural phenomena. The outcome is an exquisite black and white film fusing documentary-making, lyricism and experimentalism.

In 2015, the Turkish army conducted a major offensive operation to kill off the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, thereby silencing their independence bid. The event received no media coverage whatsoever. Not a single international correspondent was present at the time. Locals collected images mostly on their mobile phones, which Keltek when converted to the silver screen.

Meteors is a dark film, in both the connotative and the denotative sense of the adjective. Almost the entire film takes place at nighttime. The photography is gloomy and the dark shades of grey prevail above everything else. The political conjecture is also dark. People have died in the town of Cizre. There are ruins everywhere. Walls covered in bullet holes. Electricity, telephone and the internet are scarce. The Turkish army hopes that their actions will remain in the dark, entirely invisible and immune to international criticism. “We were silenced and annihilated by an invisible hand”, a local puts it succinctly.

Local hunters shooting down gazelles open the movie. But soon it’s people who are being gunned down. The similarity between the gazelles and of the people running in panic will not go unnoticed. In these long shots, the humans and quadrupedal animals are hardly discernible. The gazelles lock horns, while humans point weapons at each other.

The symbolism of fire is also used abundantly. There are torches, arson, bombs, fireworks and the eclipse of the sun. The might of fire, however, is subdued by the stern black and white photography. The military conflict becomes strangely and disturbingly serene. Some might argue that Meteors is a little exploitative, some type of “war porn”. I beg to differ. I think that this is a sensory and meditative experience with an unusual political twist.

The technical wizardry is plain and effective. The audio is particularly expressive. You will feel like you are outdoors with the wind blowing fiercely, rushing through the leaves and making slurping sounds inside your ear. The instrumental music score blends in seamlessly. There’s also plenty of throat-singing (a practice common amongst Kurds). The images of the meteor shower and solar eclipse are urgent in their simplicity. The statues of Mount Nemrut (pictured above) are featured at the very end of the film perhaps suggesting that nature and mankind, plus the ancient and the modern should finally meet.

Meteors was out in selected cinemas across the UK On December 7th, 2018, when this piece was originally published.

Watch Meteors right here with DMovies and Eyelet:

Yuva

Posted on by victorfraga

This is probably as close as you will get to a sensory experience in film. Yuva pays an enormous amount of attention to colours, textures and – above everything else – sounds. You will feel like you are in the middle of the woods with the two protagonists, while the wind rustles the leaves, caresses the trees, animals howl, coo and hoot in the distance. The sounds are so vibrant and realistic that they caused my chihuahua Lulu a lot of anxiety, and she was barking throughout the film. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way at all. Quite the opposite. Yuva hypnotised my canine daughter and I.

Veysel (Kutay Sandikci) lives in the woods almost like a hermit or a caveman. His hair and beard suggest that he has avoided contact with razors and scissors for countless years. He communicates with animals. He yodels, he pants, he growls, he roars and he howls. But there are still signs of civilisation. He inhabits a small shackle created from man-made materials, wears some clothes and he does speak Turkish. He engages in a conversation with his brother Hasan (Eray Cezayirlioglu), a smartly dressed and good-looking man of about the same age. We soon find out that developers are claiming the land inhabited by Veysel, and Hasan has come in order to convince his brother to leave. “These people are not joking”, he warns his sibling.

The photography of woods is particularly impressive, with the occasional natural light beam finding its way in, shining on our protagonist like a spotlight. Each frame looks like a painting in itself. Sometimes there is no movement for a few seconds, as if time froze. The camera hardly moves, shots are lengthy and protracted, action is languid and laconic. It reminded me a lot of Alexander Sokurov’s Mother and Son (1997), which revolves a son seeking to help an ailing mother in an equally idyllic and remote setting. The difference is that the Russian director used maternal love as the leitmotif, while the Turkish helmer Emre Yeksan opted for fraternal affection instead.

This is a movie about our relation to nature, the shock between the modern and the essence. Veysel represents a profound connection with nature, while Hasan symbolises a more affected existence. Animals, particularly dogs, play a central role in the film. They are often our closest connection to nature (Lulu can vouch for what I’m saying). In the third third of this nearly two-hour long film, an animal is hurt with a shocking outcome. This is the strongest sentence in the movie, and yet’s neither graphic nor exploitative. The violence is communicated through sounds.

Stay tuned for the very end of the movie, immediately before credits begin to roll. A very beautiful cathartic dance to an electronic soundtrack. It’s strangely liberating.

Yuva has just premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival taking place right now, and it was funded by the Biennale College Cinema. It’s also available to view it at home until September 19th as part of Festival Scope – that’s how my chihuahua Lulu and I managed to see the film without leaving the UK, and you can do the same too from the comfort of your home until September 19th.

Distant Constellation

Posted on by victorfraga

One day, we’ll all become stars. Meanwhile, while we’re still alive, every single one of us is entitled to shine. Even those in their twilight years. Distant Constellation is a tastefully crafted and profoundly lyrical documentary that celebrates life in a retirement home somewhere in Turkey. Despite the inescapability of senescence, these elderly people have not given up their will to live.

The female director Shevaun Mizrahi interviews several residents as they reminisce about their past and cling on to their liveliness in different ways. She neither infantilises nor romanticises her subjects. They don’t bemoan their physical limitations and relative confinement to a grey, soulless and oppressive building block. A partially-sighted photographer boasts about his three cameras, despite the fact that he’s no longer able to operate them. A filthy old man (note: “filthy” is a compliment at DMovies) talks about his sexual adventures at young age in graphic detail, while also quoting passages from Nabokov’s Lolita. Each resident is moving and charming in a very personal manner.

But not all is beautiful and rosy. An Armenian woman (pictured at the top) remembers the 1915 genocide and how her entire family had to convert to Islam in order to survive. “My younger brother was born in 1915, a disastrous year for Armenians in Turkey. We used to be a well-off family with a cow and a donkey”, she remembers. A man regrets his impatience and anxiety, while coughing dry. He explains: “I was worse when I was younger”. Perhaps his anxiety partly vanished with the ambitions of his youth. There is also a very disturbing scene of an elderly man writhing and panting. Maybe he suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s. Or maybe he was passing away. Either way, this sequence reminded me of the extreme realism of the care home in Ulrich Seidl’s Import Export (2007).

Executed on a very low budget and with semi-professional cameras, Distant Constellation is an impressive feat. The images are somber, languorous and often static. The persistent greyness might be difficult to capture on a television screen; this is a sensory experience for the cinema theatres. Almost like an art piece. The sounds are distant and hypnotic: the wind blowing and whistling, white noises, the clanking of an elevator going up and down, and the occasional song in the background.

There are also many symbolic devices. The elevator is a recurring theme. Elevators convey a sense of confinement and movement, both at once – a little bit like the confined residents who are still budging. There are also cranes, construction sites and an airplane flying past. They are signifiers of slow change and reconfiguration, an allegory of the cycle of life itself.

The film is dedicated “to the memory of Roger, Osep, Gerald and Selma”, four residents who presumably passed away shortly after the film was completed las year. A reminder of the ephemerality of old age and – more broadly speaking – life itself.

Distant Constellation is showing in selected cinemas across the UK from Friday, August 17th.