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Last year, director Yesim Ustaoglu saw all the documentaries made in the 1970s by Krzysztof Kieslowski. At the time, she was looking for a director of photography to shoot her new feature, Journey to the Sun (the first Turkish film in over a decade to be shown in competition in Berlin). Who better than Jacek Petrycki, Kieslowski's old cameraman? "He liked the script and he was very excited to work on the film," Ustaoglu says of the veteran cinematographer. |
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The idea for Journey to the Sun came to Ustaoglu after she read newspaper articles about villages laid waste in south-eastern Turkey. As a result of the devastation, thousands of immigrants were forced to head to the big city, where they faced discrimination on a daily basis. The film, which charts the friendship of two outsiders who meet in Istanbul, features some shocking scenes of police brutality. To westerners, such scenes may rekindle memories of Midnight Express, but Ustaoglu insists no meaningful comparison can be made between the two films. "This is a film from the inside. When I saw Alan Parker's film, I could tell it was a fairytale - nothing was real." Ustaoglu's background is in architecture. Her fascination with buildings and cityscapes is evident in the film's breathtaking, street-eye view of the vast, seething metropolis of Istanbul. "It's a huge city and it's getting bigger all the time. It's so colourful and dynamic," she says. In a way, she says, architecture and film-making go together. "It's a similar discipline. When you design a building, you have to know who will use it. You have to think about the lighting, the acoustics, the colour." None of Ustaoglu's actors are full-time professionals. She cast them because they were true to life. (For example, Nazmi Qiriz is himself a Kurd. Many of his own experiences match closely with those of the character he plays.) What does she anticipate German audiences will make of Journey to the Sun? "Of course, the subject is more sensitive if you know the history, but it's very open too. It's about identity." Germany, she points out, has a big Kurdish and Turkish community. "So I hope they will understand what I was trying to get at." Geoffrey Macnab |