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The young director Basak Buyukcelen's film won the Best Short Film Award at the 2nd Montreal Turkish Film Week. In "Dilemma"-the Film of extremes- 'Woman' is nameless...
ÖMER F. ÖZEN The 2nd Montreal Turkish Film Week and Turkish Cultural Festival just ended.
The protagonist of "Ikilem", Gafur (Ali Barkin), is a religious man, who is secluded in his own world, rejecting everything coming from the outside. He runs into a streetwalker, who looks strikingly alike, his wife. Understanding this coincidence as a sign from God, Gafur assumes responsibility to direct her onto the "right path", as he sees it. Their encounters shake foundations of his world and destroy his inner peace. The streetwalker (Cagri Berk) was not a typical prostitute. She pulled herself out of misery of a suppressive environment of her youthhood by leaving her religious family. She gained her independence by educating herself through books and observing a diverse world around her. She saw prostitution only as a mean of livelihood.
Cutting a deal
with Gafur, she promised to hear his arguments, but, in return,
he had to look at the world through her eyes, for once. She tried
to convince him that all people are God's creatures and there is
another world out there, that he misses entirely. Knowing that she
herself would not be the right example for modern life, she took
him out for a cup of tea, but even the environment of an ordinary
cafe appeared to Gafur as a source of sin.
Director Basak Buyukcelen compressed many social problems into 43 minutes of film. She tried to make the audience look at the world the way Gafur saw it, to feel his internal pain of loosing struggle with the world of sinners. Although "Ikilem" was filmed in Vancouver, the director skillfully recreated Turkish environment and a traditional Turkish household. She successfully managed to overcome a major problem of having English-speaking crew work on the film without understanding the language (only she and the main actors spoke Turkish). Living an intensive religious life, Gafur has no goal other than passing a test for the afterlife. Sporadically reminding us of the film "40 m2 Germany", directed by Tevfik Baser and produced in 1986, "Ikilem", unlike "40 m2 Germany", takes place in Turkey and has a strong religious aspect. Focusing on the lives we come across but pass by, thinking we know them, Gafur gets pulled into another's life and with the mission for his God, he finds himself in an adventure and loses his emotional balance.
After receiving different reactions to her film at the premiere in Vancouver, Basak Buyukcelen highlighted that her goal was not to present such problems in Turkey as common, but to rather show extremes, clashes of diametrically opposite lives. The film shows,
that in an environment, where both a housewife and a streetwalker
are nameless, no matter where a woman belongs to or how she lives,
regardless on their background, one half of the society disregards
the other one. The director states that the woman who tries to save herself from the system of pressure can believe in 'faith' but that it rather the imposement of others, but than her own choice. In the film, where the man is torn apart by his inner dilemma and uses the woman as a scapegoat for his own salvation, director Basak Buyukcelen prefers not to spoon-feed the viewers and pushes them into thinking by leaving the ending of the film open to their imagination. From her words
we understand that this film is a tryout and she has bigger plans
to create a trilogy of feature films showing extremes to the questioning
audience. We wish the young director success in this challenging path she has chosen. "Ikilem/Dilemma"
May-June 2010 |
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Sharing
awards with well known directors and artists of the films such as
"Uzak Ihtimal" ("Wrong Rosary"), "Mavi
Gözlü Dev" ("Nazim Hikmet the Blue Eyed Giant"),
"Gelibolu" ("Gallipoli"); a film "Ikilem"
("Dilemma") by a young filmmaker Basak Buyukcelen
won Best Short Film Award, drawing a lot of attention
from the audience. "Ikilem" points out a
sociological problem.
