A Istanbul. I migliori film del 2011

A Istanbul Modern, dal 9 al 12 febbraio (sul web, tutti i dettali e gli orari)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA, 2011 Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Turkey, 35 mm, Color, 150’, Turkish with English subtitles

“In his film Ceylan often uses tired, weary faces reminiscent of the close shots in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Through these faces he infiltrates into the very soul of the small-town environment. And in the long shots showing three old cars and men searching for a dead body on the Anatolian steppe he reflects the melancholy of his ‘lonely and beautiful country’.” – Mehmet Açar In the film, which won the Grand Prix at the 64th Cannes Film Festival, Nuri Bilge Ceylan tells the story of 12 tense hours spent by a prosecutor conducting a murder investigation with a doctor. Once more Ceylan draws a portrait of Turkey against the backdrop of Anatolian small towns, endless narrow roads, and the steppes. The film fascinates its viewers as much with its subject and actors as with its cinematography.

HAIR, 2010 Director: Tayfun Pirselimoğlu Turkey-Greece, 35 mm, Color, 131’, Turkish with English subtitles

The third installment in Tayfun Pirselimoğlu’s trilogy that follows Rıza and Haze, Hair premiered at the Locarno Film Festival where it competed for the Golden Leopard. The film’s antihero Hamdi is a wigmaker who lives alone and sleeps in his shop. He has cancer and is waiting to die. The loneliness caused by his asocial character and the malign cycle of his illness lead him to become obsessed about Meryem, a woman who one day enters his shop. This obsession will do no one any good. In Kate Lawrie Van de Ven’s words: in Hair “Pirselimoğlu meticulously sets up a riddle, frame by frame.”

PRESS, 2010 Director: Sedat Yılmaz Turkey, 35 mm, Color, 100’, Turkish with English subtitles

Press tells the story, through 17 year-old Fırat, of the newspaper Özgür Gündem which tried to expose the human rights violations in Diyarbakır in the early 90s when conflicts were at their peak in Turkey. The journalists are hampered not only by technical difficulties but by “dark forces” as well. Some are abducted and threatened, others killed in the middle of the street; their office is raided by the police. As our journalists continue doing their job pressure keeps mounting.

FUTURE LASTS FOREVER, 2011 Director: Özcan Alper France-Turkey-Germany, 35mm, Color, 108’ Turkish with English subtitles

Sumru is a music student at a university in Istanbul. She sets off for southeastern Turkey to gather and record Anatolian elegies for her thesis. As she is searching for the stories of elegies in Diyarbakır she confronts her own delayed grief; she “lost” the man she loved and, though she does not admit it even to herself, has come after him to “a violent region.” Here Sumru’s path will cross with Ahmet’s, a man wounded by the region who sells bootleg DVDs on the street. As they both slowly touch each other’s wounds they in fact put their finger on an entire country’s great bleeding wound, one that never heals. This new film by Özcan Alper, who won many awards with his previous film Autumn, is a multilingual and multicultural road movie in which a journey turns into a quest.

SHADOWS AND FACES, 2010 Director: Derviş Zaim Turkey, 35mm, Color, 116’; Turkish with English subtitles

The film is the coming-of-age story of a young girl who is separated from her father, a Karagöz shadow puppeteer, at the outbreak of the conflict between Turks and Greeks in 1963 in Cyprus. The background to the escape from ravaged villages to the safer city sheds light on the story of Cyprus itself. When a man unwillingly finds himself and his family in the midst of violence what will he risk to keep from getting involved in crime? How can he maintain his innocence and remain human in a world where violence reigns? Inspired by true events the film seeks answers to these questions. Shadows and Faces (on shadow play) is the last installment of Derviş Zaim’s “traditional Turkish arts” trilogy which began with Waiting for Heaven (on miniatures) and Dot (on calligraphy).