The 44th Istanbul Film Festival, held during the second and third weeks of April, once again offered a diverse selection of films from around the world, spanning a wide range of genres and styles. Each testimony about the program will be, in fact, a story of chance encounters and missed opportunities.
The film had a special place Frederika Hambaleka "What Marielle Knows." The film explores how hypocritical adults can be and the complications that arise when their children discover the true nature of their actions. Opening the festival with a story about pretentious people trying to maintain an illusion of moral superiority proved to be an excellent introduction.
The second film that stood out took viewers to Romania, a country with which Turkey shares the Black Sea. The name Ceausescu is still fresh in the memories of many, primarily due to his spectacular fall. He ruled the country with an iron fist and was probably the most authoritarian of all the European dictators who fell after the collapse of communism. The New Year That Never Came follows a group of people on the eve of New Year's Eve 1989. It slowly develops the story, following seemingly unrelated lives that gradually intertwine. Although slow in pace, the film ultimately rewards the audience's patience with a grandiose ending (no spoilers - Ceausescu is overthrown).
Among these “ordinary” Romanians is a construction worker trying to provide for his family. He is hired to help a wealthy family that is moving: an elderly lady has to leave her “boyar” house because it will be demolished for new urban development projects. Her son, part of the infamous secret service, is supervising students, including the son of a television producer... The picture becomes clearer. All the actors experience tragicomic encounters with the repressive system: the worker has to find a letter his son sent to Santa Claus, which accidentally compromises his father, while a TV producer tries to erase the face of a singer who has defected to the West from the New Year's program. The scenes in which a substitute singer frantically tries to avoid participating in a eulogy to Ceausescu are among the most touching in the film. In the end, all these imperfect heroes are symbolically redeemed, and the audience in Istanbul rewards their silent rebellion with thunderous applause.
The third film worth mentioning is "2073." Asif Kapadia. Kapadia, who previously wowed audiences with his lavish adaptation of the Caucasian love story "Ali and Nino", has no intention of pandering to the audience here. Instead of a fictional projection of a dark future, he confronts the audience with documented destructive events that they have already had the opportunity to see through domestic media. His post-apocalyptic heroine lives in an abandoned shopping mall; evoking the atmosphere of the novel "Severance" Ling Ma, and takes the audience through all the news she has chosen to ignore. Her mantra is: the apocalypse is not a single event, but a series of processes that are already happening. The footage includes Israeli checkpoints, but the most touching story is about the Uyghurs, how they became strangers in their own homeland and how the world watches them without resistance as they undergo forced “re-education.”
The film that holds a special place is "Harvest" by the director Athine Rachel Tsangari, adaptation of the novel John Crais from 2013, which sheds light on one of the primordial traumas of the British Isles: the process of taking away the common land and privatizing it, which began as early as the 12th century. This process permanently changed the psychology of English society, leaving profound consequences for today's land distribution, where a handful owns most of the territory.
In Tsangara’s vision, the key instrument of this change becomes the cartographer, whom she portrays as a black man with an African accent. Local hero Walter Trisk watches him with awe and admiration as he sketches the land that Walter knows intimately, but now from an unattainable, divine perspective. It’s easy to identify with this sentiment, remembering how today’s technologies like Google Maps and Street View look down on us and objectify our worlds.
As the changes take hold, the villagers are forced to abandon their traditional lives. Voltaire, through a series of tragic circumstances, remains the last villager before the village is demolished. In the film, the change comes when a relative, to whom the estate belongs - we are all familiar with such relatives from the novel Jane Austen - arrives in the village and decides that the people should stop farming and start raising livestock. In the final scene, as a silent act of resistance, Voltaire sows seeds in a plowed field, following centuries-old customs. This scene recalls the universal wisdom of all traditions, including Islam: “If you find the end of the world with a sapling in your hand – plant it.” It is this timeless wisdom and the film’s ability to portray it in 13th-century England that is its enduring beauty.
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