Beyond the Hill

As Turkey has been an international news story the past few days and was the subject of my post yesterday, I should mention a couple of Turkish films I’ve seen lately. One, ‘Beyond the Hill’ (en France: ‘Derrière la colline‘), is particularly good. It’s a family drama set in the wilderness in south-central Anatolia (in the area around Ermenek), which looks like the American west. Here’s the review in Variety

An eye-catching parable about scapegoating and the multitude of sins it covers, “Beyond the Hill,” from debuting Turkish helmer-writer Emin Alper, is a deliberately paced drama set amid the scenic hills of central Anatolia. Appealing more to the intellect than to the emotions, the low-budgeter is most interesting for the way it uses the stunning landscape, at times adopting Western iconography. The powerful visuals, as well as a special mention garnered in Berlin’s first feature competition, should pique fest programmer interest.

Retired forester Faik (Tamer Levent) lives on ancestral land and displays a feudal attitude toward his secretly rebellious sharecropper Mehmet (Mehmet Ozgur). Faik believes nomads from beyond the hill are deliberately destroying his poplar trees. When his hedonist son Nusret (Reza Ozcan) and grandsons Zafer (Berk Hakman) and Caner (Furkan Berk Kiran) come to visit, Faik’s obsession with the unseen nomads masks bad behavior on the part of the other men, as well as Zafer’s mental breakdown. Romanian-born lenser George Chiper-Lillemark (“Adalbert’s Dream”) imbues the landscape with a sense of impending threat. Accomplished soundwork also builds tension, with a climactic burst of martial music driving home the parable aspect.

And this from the review in Hollywood Reporter

Beyond the Hill, an unsettling drama set in the Turkish wilderness, plays on the “something out there” fears of a small family clan united for a summer holiday. With all the action taking place off-camera, the classic horror elements give way to a highly controlled psychological drama that veers into social parable. The glancing, off-key approach chosen by first-time director Emin Alper makes the skin crawl almost from first shot to last but will also limit the film’s audience to art house tribes willing to make some mental effort to fill in plot points Alper’s script only suggests.

The influence of director Nuri Bilge Ceylan seems to be rampant in Turkish festival films, and this is one of his more successful heirs. There is the same attention to a realistic setting, psychological detail and Chekhovian interest in delving into the soul of the common man. All the important things are never said, only hinted at, and the distracted viewer can miss the whole point of the film very easily.

The influence of Nuri Bilge Ceylan is indeed apparent in the film. Also that of other Turkish auteurs, e.g. Semih Kaplanoğlu and Reha Erdem. When it comes to this kind of film—cerebral, complex, for the “art house tribes”—the Turks are strong. And director Emin Alper, who has a doctorate in history and teaches at Istanbul Technical University, is not even a professional filmmaker. See the interview with him (w/trailer) in IndieWire, plus on YouTube; also this review in Screen Daily). So if one is a member of an art house tribe, don’t miss it.

The other film seen recently was ‘Men on the Bridge‘, directed by Aslı Özge, which came out in 2009, even made it to the US in ’12, but only arrived in Paris (at the Saint-André-des-Arts) a couple of months ago. It’s a small film—originally intended to be a documentary—, about the parallel lives of three men who work around Istanbul’s Bosphorus Bridge: a bus driver who, with his wife, is striving—not too successfully—to climb into the middle class; a young lonely heart police officer searching for female companionship; and a teenage boy at the bottom of the social ladder—he had to be a Rom—trying to make ends meet, also not too successfully. Three lives in the pulsating Istanbul megalopolis. Not a film for the masses but may be seen by art house tribes. The NYT review is here and Village Voice review here.