Between two quakes
At the currency exchange booths on Istiklal Street, you can watch the value of the Turkish lira declining on a daily basis. The devastating earthquake in eastern Anatolia is another topic that is still on everyone’s lips. But Turkish people are looking ahead, to 14 May, the date of the parliamentary and presidential elections. Almost everyone you talk to is hoping for a change of government. Whether or not it happens, the political quake will be huge.
But judging by the 42nd Istanbul Film Festival, which ended on 18 April in the middle of Ramadan, all this adversity has dented neither people's delight in cinema, nor the creative drive of cinematographers. In fact, it seems to have had the opposite effect: it is these difficult circumstances that have provided the perfect backdrop for many films, sharpening their message. And the entries profiting most from this are those anchored at the interface between Europe and Asia.
Fifty German films?
Fifty German films were screened at the festival, the representative of "German Films" told us at the Goethe-Institut's breakfast reception on the Saturday of the festival. But that was just window dressing. Fifty films with German involvement are not even close to being fifty German films. Some of the best entries overall were joint German-Turkish, German-Kurdish, and German-Iranian productions, while the "purely" German films looked a little fanciful against the hard backdrop of Istanbul.
One example of German unworldliness were the stories about writers' problems with their neurotic partners: take Max Frisch (Ronald Zehrfeld) and Ingeborg Bachmann (Vicky Krieps) for instance, in Margarethe von Trotta's Bachmann biopic Reise in die Wueste (Journey into the Desert).
Or the budding author Leon (Thomas Schubert) who is wrangling with his manuscript, and an anorexic German student called Nadja, played by Paula Beer in Christian Petzold's Roter Himmel (Red Sky).
Seen from Istanbul, German film seems to have got stuck in the "new subjectivity" of the 1980s. This approach founders miserably on the new global reality.
What a contrast to the "German" films that have come not only, and indeed not principally, from German heads! In Rheingold, the cinematic treatment of the German-Kurdish gangster rapper Giwar Hijabi (aka Xatar)'s eventful life, Fatih Akin treads a fine line between TV-friendly, mainstream entertainment and a sufficiently authentic portrayal of migrant life.
The two other outstanding Turkish-German productions at the festival are more aesthetically rigorous and artistic: Ararat, a film by Engin Kundag, and In the Blind Spot from Ayse Polat, who now lives in Berlin.
In the surveillance society
In the Blind Spot, which was awarded "Best Turkish Film" in Istanbul, is a political drama disguised as a thriller: a meditation on generational trauma, the paranoia of a surveillance society and political violence. Set in the Kurdish town of Kars in north-eastern Turkey, the plot centres on the family of a Turkish nationalist spy, who is himself monitored and threatened, while monitoring a German film crew.
One of the principal roles is played by Cagla Yurga, who at just seven years old develops a magical presence as Melek, the spy's daughter. Melek (whose name means "angel") seems haunted by visions. In reality, she is acting out the paranoia that persecution and surveillance causes, repressed by everyone else.
It is very rare to see such a convincing performance from a child in such an up-to-the-minute political film. The repression, which in the end inevitably backfires on the oppressors themselves, is played subtly and yet openly in this complex political parable. It is cinema that reflects on the violence that the camera lens itself can inflict, thus calling its own medium into question. It is indeed faintly surprising that there was no issue in screening the film, part-funded by ARTE, in Istanbul. We can only hope that it makes it onto German screens.
Reversal of power relations
Engin Kundag's Ararat works very differently, but is no less powerful. The parents of Zeynep (Merve Aksoy) who is studying in Germany, have invested in a quarry on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey.
Following a car accident caused by Zeynep in Berlin, she runs home to her parents, full of aggression, dissects their dysfunctional marriage and reverses the traditional, patriarchal power relations: instead of enduring her father's punishment lecture, she strikes back – literally. She confronts her father's colleague, who is having a relationship with her mother, and doesn't shy away from humiliating him sexually, too.
The Turkish name for Ararat is Agri – also the Turkish word for pain. The dormant volcano with the expressive name, which rises out of the barren landscape, symbolises the pain and anger that can arise unannounced from the fragmentation of many a Turkish-German life plan. In this film, this is brought to life in almost torturously long shots from a stationary camera. There is not a lot of talking in these shots, and not much happens, either. But the little that does happen has such an unsparing impact that it stays with viewers for a long time.
German-Iranian films
It is not just German-Turkish, but German-Iranian films that were shown at this impressively political festival. Sieben Winter in Teheran (Seven Winters in Tehran) by Steffi Niederzoll is a documentary about the fate of Reyhaneh Jabbari: she was just nineteen when she stabbed and killed the man who had lured her into his apartment under false pretences and tried to rape her.
In Iran, the death penalty to which she was sentenced must be carried out by the victim’s family, though they can also commute it. After seven years of torment and fruitless negotiation between the families, Reyhaneh Jabbari was executed on 25 October 2014.
Using covertly-filmed mobile phone footage from the family, and with the help of interviews and reconstructed sets, Niederzoll manages to shed light on this brutal, but in practice hardly filmable aspect of reality in Iran.
Since she could not travel to the country, she had to rely on collaborations with friends and activists in Iran, as well as those living in exile. A moving German-Iranian co-production was thus created in secret, though unfortunately its Iranian supporters cannot be named for security reasons.
Iranian Holocaust film
The second Iranian film that caused a stir may have been a purely Iranian production, but it has a deep, dark connection to German history. Awarded "Best International Film" in Istanbul, World War III by Houman Seyyedi is at first glance a social drama. The central character is day labourer Shakib (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who is hired to help build a film set – for a Holocaust film.
When the actor playing Hitler suddenly dies, Shakib is told to take on the role of the dictator. At first he resists, but he can't fight the pressure from the crew. He hides his girlfriend, the deaf-mute prostitute Ladan (Mahsa Hejasi), in the film-set house he is living in during the shoot, but the house goes up in flames – just as the screenplay says it should.
Ladan burns with it, but no one will believe Shakib and acknowledge her death, let alone take responsibility for it. In his despair, the reluctant Hitler takes his role literally and justice into his own hands, resulting in mass murder.
A parable of the state of the world
This plot plays out with the inexorability of a Greek tragedy, while at the same time appearing to be the inevitable result of a broken society. Fascism does not return under the mantle of Islam; it arises from stark economic inequalities, political pressures and power relations within society.
The film is a great parable not only of Iran, but of the state of our world as a whole. Appearance and reality, fiction and truth blend into one another uncontrollably and, in the end, there is no one left to take responsibility.
The festival has been a runaway success with audiences. The vast majority of screenings were sold out. Where Hollywood, Cannes or Berlin are often about glamour, in Istanbul it was about the whole picture. Here, appearances are never so beautiful that they overlay reality. Rather than serving as an illusion machine, cinema becomes an instrument for lifting the veil from reality.
We might see the same films at many other festivals, but it is particularly worth seeing them in Istanbul. If they are merely screened at other festivals, here they have to pass the reality test. It is only here that they show what they can do – and perhaps what they can't.
Cross-cutting with reality
At the end of the Saturday breakfast at the Goethe-Institut, where the talk was of fifty German films, one could walk over to the famous shopping mile on Istiklal Street, a stone's throw from the Goethe-Institut, and witness a small demonstration. The demonstrators were the "Saturday Mothers"; they gather every week to remember their sons who were abducted and disappeared by the state, and who were one of the inspirations for Ayse Polat's film.
To prevent any passers-by from deciding to join them, the mothers were cordoned off from the streams of people in the pedestrian precinct by a line of heavily-armed police officers. Inside the cordon, seven officers had formed a second, much tighter circle around one barely-visible protestor. It was Musa Piroglu, chained to his wheelchair – he is an MP for the pro-Kurdish HDP, the "Democratic People’s Party".
What had been shown in the films just the previous evening suddenly seemed to be playing out on the streets. In Istanbul, fiction and reality enter into a dialogue full of tension, surprise and realisation. And that is what made this 42nd Istanbul Film Festival so powerful and so unique.
© Qantara.de 2023
Translated from the German by Ruth Martin