AUTUMN/SONBAHAR by Özcan Alper
Focus on World Cinema
Turkey 2008 / Colour / 106 min
PRODUCTION TEAM
Director :Özcan Alper
Script :Özcan Alper
Photography :Feza Çaldiran
Editor :Thomas Balkenhol
Cast :Onur Saylak, Megi Koboladze, Serkan Keskin, Raife Yenigül, Nino Lejava
AUTUMN
Sentenced to jail in 1997 as a university student aged 22, Yusuf is released on health grounds 10 years later. He returns to his village in the Black Sea region, where he's welcomed only by his sick and elderly mother. It turns out that his father died while he was in jail and his older sister got married and moved away to the city. Economic factors mean that it's almost exclusively old people who live in the mountain villages, and the only person Yusuf sees is his childhood friend Mikhail. As autumn slowly gives way to winter, Yusuf meets Eka, a beautiful Georgian hooker. Neither the timing nor circumstances are right for these two people from different worlds. For all that, love becomes a final desperate attempt to grasp life and elude loneliness.
Özcan Alper
Born in Artvin, Turkey, in 1975, Özcan Alper studied physics and history of science at the University of Istanbul. Since 1997 he has been working as assistant director and production manager on a variety of productions. He directed a short fiction, Grandmother (2001), and two short documentaries, Voyage in the Time With a Scientist (2002) and Rhapsody and Melancholy in Tokai City (2005).
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1 comment:
Seen April 4, 2009 as part of NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS '09 and screened at the Walter Reade Theater, NYC. This is a beautifully shot, strongly political film demonstrating the effects of a ten year imprisonment (and torture) on a young man in modern Turkey. The film also addresses the disappearing culture of the Hemşinli Armenian people of Northeastern Turkey near the border with Georgia. This is a memorable and highly effecting film.
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