The 44th Istanbul Film Festival, held during the second and third weeks of April, once again showcased a diverse array of films from around the world, encompassing a range of genres and styles. Everyone will have had their own festival, seeing the films that fit their schedule (especially when it is still term time) and such was the case with me. Any account of the program will be an account of serendipities and near misses.
For me, the festival opened with Frederic Hambalek’s "What Marielle Knows." I make a point of attending German films when they come to Istanbul, as I like to stay up-to-date with what's happening in the second most Turkish country in Europe. My heart sank a little when I saw Felix Kramer’s face on the screen, as I have unjustly conflated him with his utterly contemptible character in "Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything." In "What Marielle Knows," his character was slightly less contemptible and I was just about able to sit through his scenes. The film is about how contemptible grown-ups are, and how, when (their) children get to know what they get up to, things get complicated. Starting the film festival with pretentious people pretending to have the moral high ground proved an excellent choice.
The second film was set in a location also not far from Turkish concerns, in our Black Sea neighbor, Romania. The name "Ceausescu" is familiar to my generation, mostly with his dramatic downfall. He ruled the country with an iron fist and was arguably the most dictatorial of dictators to fall in Europe after the collapse of communism. The film "New Year That Never Came" tells the story of a group of people right before the New Year in 1989. It starts off following the lives of different people whose stories slowly converge. The film takes its time establishing these connections and is a slow burner in general, but this slowness pays off when the operatic ending (no spoilers, Ceausescu is toppled) arrives.
These "everyday" Romanians include a construction worker who is trying to earn a living for his family and just about makes ends meet. He is hired to work for a wealthy family who is moving houses- an old lady has to leave her "boyar" house as it will be destroyed along with several others to make room for new developments. The son of this family is part of the country’s bloated secret service apparatus and is surveilling students, one of whom is the son of a TV producer ... you get the picture. All these people have tragicomic run-ins with the state. The worker must locate a letter his small son has sent to Father Christmas, which unwittingly compromises his dad, the TV producer, who has to erase the face of a singer who has defected to the West from the special New Year program. To this end, they try to shoot new scenes with a nervous and not very likable look-alike who doesn’t want to be involved in a Ceausescu praising venture. The scenes where she goes to great lengths to try to get out of the job are some of the most poignant in the film. In the end, all these imperfect characters are redeemed, and the audience in Istanbul gives them a hearty applause for resisting the system in their small ways.
Next on my program was Asif Kapadia’s "2073," which I went into thinking would be a postapocalyptic fiction film. Kapadia has been in my good books since this sumptuous adaptation of the Caucasus love story, ‘Ali and Nino’, but in ‘2073’, he has no intention of pleasing the audience. Viewers going into the film thinking they will be given a fictitious and demoralizing projection of the future are, in fact, given footage of moments of destruction of Earth and human society we have already seen in news reels. Our postapocalyptic heroine lives in an abandoned mall – reminiscent of the one in Ling Ma’s 2018 novel, "Severance" – and it is she who takes us through all the news we have ignored. Her repeated mantra is that the apocalyptic ‘event’ is not a single event, but a series of events that we are currently experiencing. The footage is naturally peppered with Israeli checkpoints, but what jumped at me most was the process of how Uyghurs were made ‘aliens’ in their own homeland and how a whole population is now in a ‘retraining’ camp and of course how this continues to happen within our knowledge, but that it has become one of the atrocities we have been numbed about.
A film that was particularly pertinent to my interests was Athina Rachel Tsangari’s "Harvest," adapted from John Crace’s 2013 novel, which explores a primal trauma in the British Isles: enclosure. Enclosure is the division of communal fields into individually owned and managed farm plots, which began in the 12th century. It marks a shift in the English psyche and leads to the land arrangement in England today, where most of the land is owned by a handful of people. In the film, this change comes when a cousin who the manor house has passed down to – we are all acquainted with these cousins from Jane Austen- arrives in the village and decides that people should cease to do agriculture and shift to animal farming.
In Tsangari’s production, one of the chief instruments of this shift is the map maker, who she has cast as a black man with an African accent. It is with marvel and apprehension that our local hero, Walter Thirsk, watches the map maker as he draws the land that Thirsk knows so well, but from a godlike perspective. I instantly connect with this apprehension and liken the process to our fascination with Google Maps and Google Street View, where landscapes you know have become digitized, and you are under surveillance all the time. After I get into this mindset, all the changes that are happening in Thirsk’s village seem immediate. People have to change their profession, and they have to leave their villages because the landlord has other plans for them. And it is the meekness that hits me most- the meekness that I recognize in myself and my contemporaries – something that Kapadia’s "2073" also warns about, while corporations are changing our way of life.
Through a series of unfortunate events, Thirsk is the last person to be left in the village before it is razed to the ground. The cousin has promised that there will be no more ploughing in the land, and so in the last scene, as a last act of resistance, we see Thirsk in a ploughed field, sowing seeds in the age-old way. As far as apocalypses go, this is what people are advised to do in the Islamic tradition: if the day of the apocalypse should find you with a sapling in hand, plant it. This is wisdom shared across all cultures, and it is the beauty of cinema that allows us to see it acted out in 13th-century England.
