TURKEY-GREECE-BALKANS

Directed by Ömer Kavur
Turkey 1987, 35mm, color, 110 min.
With Macit Koper, Serra Yilmaz, Orhan Cagman
Turkish with English subtitles

Set in a mansion in Istanbul that has been converted into a fourteen-room hotel, Kavur?s film focuses on the manager of the establishment, the tormented Zebercet. What appears to be a straightforward narrative turns inward, however, at its midpoint, compelling us to reconsider the meaning of all that has come before in the narrative: it becomes clear that the woman we have seen in the film?s first shot is merely the memory of a real visitor?or perhaps a phantom?that haunts the hotel?s troubled proprietor. By Harvard Film Archive.

An impassive man, statically framed in nearly imperceptible long shot slowly, and laboredly, traverses an untreaded, snow-covered open field carrying a duffle bag until he emerges in near frontal medium shot on the other side of the clearing towards a deserted rural road. It is an unhurried, deliberative image that recalls the extended final sequence of Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees as the romantically thwarted hero makes his way down the side of a hill to the area where an off-camera director has been surreptitiously observing him as he pursued the reluctant objective of his affection. The understated introductory image proves to be the first of several referential cues that filmmaker would incorporate to tell the deceptively simple, yet acutely observed story of a displaced laborer from the province, Yusuf (Emin Toprak), who, laid off from his factory job and unable to find new employment in his economically depressed village, decides to board a bus bound for Istanbul and arranges to stay at the home of his urbanite cousin, a successful and cosmopolitan art photographer named Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), as he scouts the city for job opportunities in the hopes of being able to send money home to his aging (and equally destitute) parents and to lead what he perceives to be an exotic life as a global traveling freight ship worker (and perhaps more importantly, to permanently leave his bucolic, insular village). It is a visit that, however polite and cordial, begins to betray traces of Mahmut's character as well, as Yusuf soon finds that he is locked out of his cousin's apartment and is forced to wait at the front lobby while the preoccupied Mahmut, having forgotten Yusuf's planned arrival, stays out into the late evening. Forced into accommodating a reluctant intrusion into his personal space, the intensely private and self-consumed Mahmut grows increasingly resentful and impatient over his aimless and naïve cousin's underformed plans and passivity towards the execution of his seemingly half-hearted (and invariably fruitless) job search - a frustration that irreparably escalates when Mahmut returns from a visit with his hospitalized mother (Fatma Ceylan) to find that Yusuf had indifferently violated a series of his seemingly innocuous, pre-defined house rules during his brief absence.

Distant is an elegantly realized, pensive, and hauntingly lucid exposition on the nature of rootlessness, estrangement, and solitude. From the allusive opening sequence of Yusuf's unhurried ascent onto a hillside road captured from the static camera, Nuri Bilge Ceylan creates a meditative - and refreshingly self-effacing - composition of distilled, concentrated imagery, narrative economy, and reverent paean to deliberately paced cinema. Ceylan's allusions to Andrei Tarkovsky (both directly through a conversation with friends, and indirectly, through excerpts of Stalker and Mirror on television) serve to illustrate Mahmut's innate understanding of the need (though not necessarily the willingness) for artistic and personal compromise. The evocative use of the melancholic theme from Theo Angelopoulos' Landscape in the Mist (as Yusuf rides a streetcar through a shopping district) reinforces the film's similar exploration into the themes of parental disconnection, profound isolation, and existential angst. Even the intrinsic, understated humor that pervades the film becomes a vehicle for a quaint homage in a scene reminiscent of Darezhan Omirbaev's Kaïrat as the timid, introverted hero casually, but deliberately, brushes against an attractive young woman on a public bus. In the end, it is this acceptance of humility, thoughtful sense of place, and embrace of human idiosyncracy that is reflected in Mahmut's early winter morning reverie on a park overlook as uniformly indistinguishable cargo ships navigate through the harbor - an observant reflection of the quiet, unarticulated desolation of self-imposed alienation, adriftness, and emotional transience - a longing to experience the familiar against a tranquil sea of faceless, disconnected anonymity.

Yavuz Turgul, one of the most respectful Turkish film directors, points out a long lasting love. He wasts most of his life in the prison becasue of Kasha.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan elegantly channels the spirit and self-reflexivity of Atom Egoyan's Calendar and Roberto Rossellini's seminal Voyage in Italy (that in turn, paved the way for Michelangelo Antonioni's psychological landscape films) to create an equally sublime, serenely composed, and understatedly bittersweet chronicle of the dissolution of a relationship through the austerity and desolation of the landscape in his latest film Climates. As the film begins, a middle-aged university instructor and doctoral candidate named Isa (Nuri Bilge Ceylan), en route to a summer holiday in the idyllic Aegean coast with his younger lover, a television art director named Bahar (Ebru Ceylan), deliberatively shoots a series of photographs of ancient ruins for possible use in a class lecture, oblivious to his traveling companion's noticeable discomfort and tedium over his latest distractive side trip (a figurative myopia that would subsequently be manifested in Bahar's reckless, symbolic act of blindness during a motorcycle ride), her sense of profound desolation and estrangement momentarily betrayed by the eruption of tears that also escape the self-absorbed Isa's regard. The metaphoric image of the troubled couple standing amidst architectural ruins serves as an insightful prefiguration of their seemingly inevitable separation, a distance that was made all the more insurmountable by Isa's act of infidelity with his former lover, Serap (Nazan Kesal) during one of Bahar's recent, on location shooting trips away from Istanbul. In hindsight, Isa's unfinished thesis also reveals his self-inflicted pattern of irresolution, emotional cruelty (a sadistic streak that is also revealed through his act of forced intimacy with a resistant Serap) , and inability to commit, an emotional paralysis that has perhaps even sublimated into a physical affliction (through a chronic, stiff neck running gag that recalls the pollution-induced malady of Tsai Ming-liang's The River). Charting the indefinable trajectory of Isa's restlessness, alienation, and melancholy through the climatic and geographic changes that reflect the interiority of Isa's unrequited - and indefinable - longing, Climates exquisitely (and indelibly) maps a spare, elegiac, and achingly intimate meditation on the ephemeral seasons of the human heart.

Arap Sado, sokaktaki egemenli?ini ailenin küçük o?lu Salih'e b?rak?r. Ancak Salih bu görev için henüz haz?r de?ildir. Metropolün arka sokaklar?ndan birinde ya?anan bu karma?ada Salih, Tina'ya a??k olur.

Poet Yusuf returns to his childhood hometown, which he hadn't visited for years, upon his mother's death. A young girl, Ayla awaits him in a crumbling house. Yusuf has been unaware of the existence of this distant relation who had been living with his mother for five years.

Ayla has something to ask of Yusuf . Yusuf is obliged to perform the sacrifice his mother Zehra had been prevented by death from fulfilling. Yusuf agrees as he finds himself unable to withstand the passive rhythm of rural life, the spaces imbued with the ghosts and personages of old lovers and friends, nor against the overriding feeling of guilt.

Yusuf and Ayla set off for the saint's tomb, some three or four hours away, for the traditional sacrifice ceremony. Unable to locate the herd amongst which the sacrificial animal was to be selected, they have to spend the night in a hotel by the crater lake. Yusuf and Ayla are drawn closer together by the atmosphere of the wedding party at the hotel.

While the falling snow blankets guilt, the place to which they are returning will no longer be that old town.

http://www.dinaview.com/?cat=100

I managed to get REMBETIKO by Costas FERRIS added to Flixster. Don't miss it.

Sry. also the price of Love, 1984, by Tonia MARKETAKI.

In turn of the century Greece, a young girl falls for a dashing young man in their island village, but because the man's family asks for too much of a dowry, the girl's mother refuses to hand off her daughter. Risking shame and estrangement, the girl denies her mother's wishes and runs off with her lover, much to the evil chagrin of the local townsfolk. The film is both a careful analysis of old-world traditions and an indictment on Greece's modern sexist society.

Also Known As: I Timi Tis Agapis

Genres: Drama and Romance

Running Time: 2 hrs. 46 min.

Production Co.: Andromeda Productions, Greek Film Centre, ERT 1

Filming Locations: Corfu, Greece

Produced in: Greece

Welcome on board.

http://hoopla.nu/films/brides/brides.html

Never on Sunday. Director Passes Away
April 1st, 2008 by Kenna McHugh in Directors, Movie News

American director Jules Dassin who directed the 1960's hit movie 'Never on Sunday' and six more of his films, died late Monday. He was 96. His other films included 'Reunion in France,' a 1942 wartime romance with Joan Crawford and John Wayne; 'Brute Force,' a 1947 prison drama starring Burt Lancaster; and the detective thriller 'The Naked City' in 1948. A truly exceptional director whose integrity cause him to live Hollywood during the notorious blacklisting era.

http://www.nuribilgeceylan.com/

N.B.Ceylan looks at a part of misery of human being. I found the subject rather universal. A life about lossers. Phography is very good. Cinematograpic language is so strong. Chossing place, using time and performance of players are perfect. I prefer DISTANT, but this film tells more than it. Don't miss it.

Perfect novel. You have to read it.

Sentenced to jail in 1997 as a university student aged 22, Yusuf is released on health grounds 10 years later. He returns to his village in the eastern Black Sea region, where he's welcomed only by his sick and elderly mother. It turns out that his father died while he was in jail and his older sister got married and moved away to the city.
Economic factors mean that it's almost exclusively old people who live in the mountain village, and the only person Yusuf sees is his childhood friend Mikail. As autumn slowly gives way to winter, Yusuf goes with Mikail to a tavern where he meets Eka, a beautiful young Georgian hooker. Neither the timing nor circumstances are right for these two people from different worlds to be together. For all that, love becomes a final desperate attempt to grasp life and elude loneliness - for Yusuf at least. For Eka, Yusuf is something like a character from the pages of a Russian novel: a character who inhabits a faraway world and a faraway time.
With the 1990s as a backdrop, the film at once documents and criticises a slice of recent history, exposing the irony, ruthlessness and reality of the period.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425079/

ZanziBar. Final is increadiable. Real story.

Metin ERKSAN is the most controversial film director in Turkey. He was making films when others try to make out what a camera is. DRY SUMMER (Susuz Yaz), 1964 is in top ten Turkish Cinema. Dry Summer, a village story whose source is the struggle over land and water, is one of the most stunning examples of the clash between good and evil in the Turkish Cinema. Repeating the success he achieved with The Revenge of the Snakes, a Fakir Baykurt adaptation shot in 1962, in Dry Summer, Metin Erksan shows the confrontation between two brothers, Osman and Hasan. Osman surrounds the water that springs from their lands with barriers to prevent the village from using it. Being a good man, Hasan argues that the others should also use the water. Confessing a murder actually committed by his brother, Hasan is convicted and sent to jail. After his release he learns that Osman used deception to take away his wife and marry her. Hasan loses control. In the ensuing fight, he drowns Osman in the water and then clears away the barriers.

One of the best examples of the social realism that first appeared in Turkish Cinema in the early 60's, Dry Summer, due to its success in portraying the sexuality of rural areas and its ingenuity in handling erotic elements, earns a special place in our film history. One should also emphasize that the film marked the rise of Hülya Koçyigit's career.

Metin Erksan worked as a cinema critic in various newspapers and magazines. He graduated from the Department of History of Art in Istanbul University. In 1952, he directed his first film, The Life of Poet Veysel written by Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu. He directed social realistic films such as Beyond the Nights, The Revenge of the Snakes 1962, Bitter Life and created his own style in his later films such as Dry Summer, Time to Love, 1965 and The Well, 1968. He won the Golden Bear with Dry Summer in Berlin Film Festival in 1964 and became a pioneer in the recognition of Turkish cinema abroad.

Too much mess less sweet. Experimental. Wild Bunch.