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Anayurt Oteli (1987)
More Than A Hotel: Motherland
A three stories, fourteen rooms manor facing the street that leads from station square to main street of the city (indeed Manisa). Once built on the Greek neighbourhood by great grandfather of Zebercet (Olivine). Luckily rescued from the fire of 1922. But after that, the family decides to move to Izmir and the father of Zebercet insists on turning it into a hotel. Zebercet, the clerk and present owner of the hotel after his father, born in 1930 in the big room (now No.1) in the ground floor (now the lobby).
One day a beautiful woman stays there one night and leaves to "visit again within a week or so" and Zebercet starts to wait for this unknown but seemingly long-waited woman who came with delayed Ankara train, as he has been waiting this Kafkaesque manor and the dead. He keeps waiting for her. He gradually loses track of daily life. And hotel goes into a deterioration as if implying psychological decline of its proprietor.
This based-on-a-novel film is the most striking story of loneliness, alienation and depression in Turkish cinema. It tells the conflict of individual in a repressive society, sexual isolation and distortion of personality.
I nostri anni (2000)
A Vintage Theme: Resistance
During the war, Alberto and Natalino were on the mountains and they fought side by side as partisans in resistance brigade. Now these two old chaps continue their long-lasting, strong friendship and the ghosts of mopping-ups by black brigades still trouble their minds.
Natalino lives alone in the mountains near an isolated village and Alberto stays in a boarding house where he meets another old chap, Umberto, who is forced to wheelchair. They make friends and one day Alberto discovers that Umberto is a former officer of fascist black brigades responsible for a terrible massacre and the slaughter of an old partisan about which Alberto and Natalino still have qualms. Alberto decides to tell everything to Natalino. They don't know whether to forgive or revenge.
Wild Blue, notes à quelques voix (2000)
An Evocative Haunting Poetry
During collecting pictures of awful cruelty and unique beauty for his experimental high-contrast black-and-white documentary for seven years, capturing one-off moments through the eyes of women all around the world while they are testifying in nine languages true stories of barbarism, murder and acts of violence, from knee-capping of traitors among Ireland's militants to terrorism in idyllic African villages, from snipers of Sarajevo to anti-immigrant letter-bomb attacks in Vienna crowned the director Knauff with some of the most sublime succession of images in documentary film-making, which is in-between a cinematographic essay and a poem without a translucent storyline.
The result is marvellous: as if the director entrances you during the film and awakens you in the darkness of theatre, once you are outside you see more, you listen more, you think more than you do.
Invocación (2000)
In Between The Lands of Fiction and Fact
The film mixes fiction and documentary, tracks down the relationship between separate events which basically occurred in different times but apparently connected by military dictatorship beginning with March 24, 1976 in Argentina. The inspiration of the film is mainly "to conserve the memory, not to give in to the mercy of the powerful and continue the fight."
This drama-documentary opens with reconstructing the process of shooting a short action film in Super 8 by three children about 12 years old during spring 1973 in Buenos Aires. As they have very limited Super 8 raw film, later in the film we learn that those three friends will have to only shoot a very little story of kidnapping and rescue.
And then following this opening scene, the film shifts to the night of March 24, 1999 and starts to reconstruct memory rather in a very wider sense. Damian and Sonetchka, two dwarfs, meet accidentally, take a walk for chat and fall in love each other in the streets of Buenos Aires. Sonetchka tells about her wish to find out where her lost mother could be.
Meanwhile the film gathers the testimonies of the mothers and the grandmothers of Plaza del Mayo, the members of H.I.J.O.S. and the survivors of the attack to A.M.I.A. (Argentian Jewish Association was attacked July 18, 1994 in the capital city during which two childhood friends of director Hector Faver died as well).
Mi mou aptou (1996)
Never Let The Cats Of Out Bag
In this delightful comedy, Evoulos, a young man, has a habit of touching attractive women in the city buses of Athens during rush hours. As an idealist he works on perfecting his art, this sense of touching masterfully his female victims and he practices in empty buses in the garages blindfolded in his spare times.
Amazingly enough, one day he feels somebody touches him on a bus. Aye, he meets a woman of same fixation. Now every thing turns upside down, the woman hunts for him and harasses him. Unexpectedly the nightmare of women almost becomes an escapee, his emotional vulnerability and misery comes to surface. But there is still one more cat in bag for Evoulos and his female admirer.
Vasiliki (1997)
A Good Example of Modern Greek Cinema
It is based on a true story, where a young soldier and the wife of a revolutionary guy falls in love while in the background we witness political turmoils of Greece at that time.
A catching story, a strong cinematography, a very good cast, but the pace of narration somehow is an obstacle.
The film opens with a very long (maybe too long), slow-paced and peaceful shot of rural Greece which in the beginning seems like secret date of two lovers but gradually we see that it becomes an ambush in during civil war of 1949.
During violent interrogations, a strong sexual attraction happens between young sergeant and determined Vassiliki which is after giving a way to a passionate love. And sergeant, instead of sending her to military court, he lets her go and thus he's blacklisted. He tears off his ranks and listens to his heart. But their relationship never gets any approval. They have to confront with political conditions of the period and themselves.
It IS absolutely interesting to see how the Greece and Turkey have passed through the similar political experiences at the last half of XXth century.
La mano che nutre la morte (1974)
A Shorter Turkey Version, deserves not more than 6
I watched Turkey version of this movie from a very old VHS cassette that was discovered, after the death of either Turkish co-producer or co-director, by a garbage collector in a pile of tapes and documents in front of his house. A second-hand bookseller pointed them to me.
The film was re-edited by co-director Yilmaz Duru and just 78 minutes. It seems that those other 9 minutes was very gory for the eyes of Turkish co-producer Tugra Film and they decided to chop that footage. There were neither "yanking the guts out of a dead puppy" by Kinski nor his "spending a lot of time running wild through the woods". He was more of a decent but passionate guy, anyway he was spooky.
There were some inconsistencies during the film, or better some long jumps in the narration. After the professor's henchman buries Daniel out somewhere in the garden, then all of a sudden in the next scene we see Daniel trying to free from sarcophagus in the cellar. And the film finishes right after Daniel runs out the manor through the woods and collapses crying on the grasses.
The film is also one of the attempts by the Turkish actor Ayhan Isik, who died relatively early and was very famous and loved in his home country, to expand abroad through European co-productions. Henchman Erol Tas was also among the popular Turkish supporting actors of his time, frequently portraying the villain.