Turkish fest a weird and dark delight
MOVIES
IAdrian Mack
t’s a complex and troubled society, with a beautiful and ancient culture, locked inside any number of dicey geopolitical arguments—and it makes some seriously great movies. When the fifth annual Vancouver Turkish Film Festival gets under way at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at SFU Woodward’s next Friday (November 2), Vancouverites will get another blast of a national cinema that’s been turning critics and cinephiles on their heads in recent years. Here are three titles we really liked. BUTTERFLIES A surrealist with a light touch, Tolga Karaçelik follows his creepily amusing 2015 feature Ivy with this deadpan tale of three estranged siblings called home by a father they never really knew. Karaçelik’s sideways sensibility is nutshelled in these characters: older brother Cemal is an astronaut with no hope of ever going to space; boozy middle sibling Kenan dubs cat voices onto home videos but calls himself an actor; sister Suzan is an undetonated device in shades who manages to get them all beaten up on the way to their hometown of Hasanlar. This is, of course, a film about broken humans discovering each other and themselves, but blah-blah logline thinking aside, it’s really a venue for some delightfully low-energy comedy and one of the most sardonic punch lines we’ve seen in years. Friday, November 2 (8:15 p.m.) TAKSIM HOLD’EM Released a year after the coup attempt, and in the wake of the May Day riots, Michael Önder’s debut feature wants to take a scalpel to the attitudes of millennial professionals in Turkey’s capital. Alper is determined to go through with his weekly poker game, even while Istanbul is rocked by demonstrations. Set almost entirely in his living room while riot police break heads in the streets outside (the title puns the poker game with Taksim Square in Istanbul), this becomes a hothouse for its characters’ varying political (or apolitical) stripes. In his lucky Lebowski bathrobe and sporting a terminally disengaged mien, is the cynical Alper any less noble than would-be (mostly would-be) freedom fighter Altan? When Alper’s journalist fiancée returns to the apartment with an injured foot and a Samaritan who might be an undercover cop, the stakes, for those of us living under a somewhat less bat-shit regime, become a lot more vivid. It’s a bit stagey, but Hold’em still maintains its grip. Saturday, November 3 (4:30 p.m.)
MORE One of two films at VTFF this year dealing with the Syrian-refugee crisis (and with a free panel talk on the subject on November 3), the bruising More centres on Gaza, a somewhat opaque youth, already adorned with a pugilist’s face, who helps his brute of a father (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s porcine Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan) in his business of smuggling refugees to Greece. This is purely a moneymaking deal for the old man, with some vile fringe benefits. Actor Onur Saylak shows real flair with his directorial debut; he’s turned out an importantseeming work that comes on at times like an art-house horror movie. That might be problematic for some, but as an interrogation of the nature of abuse and the cycles of dehumanization that happen on the micro and macro scale, More ends up as VTFF’S must-see film. Saturday, November 3 (8:30 p.m.)