Tribeca 2912 | Beyond the Hill

Beyond the Hill

Release Year: 2012

Runtime: 94 Minutes Directed by: Emin Alper

SYNOPSIS

In the quiet foothills of Turkey, Faik lives an isolated existence. When his second son brings his boys for a visit, Faik takes the opportunity to pontificate about the law of the land, as he sees it. He shares one unsolicited thought after the next, most particularly focusing on the elusive nomads whom he suspects have been trespassing on his property. The day and night wear on, and each member of the clan takes his turn entrusting the film's audience with his own dark secret.


In his feature debut, Emin Alper demonstrates a level of skill and subtlety in execution that earns him the distinction of a talent to watch. His use of space and setting creates a strikingly ominous narrative out of the simplicity of topography and facial expression. These landscapes—whether Faik's hills or a twisting grimace in close-up—become the driving dramatic forces within the story. Masterfully evoking tension through isolation, landscape, and unspoken conflict, Alper conveys that what lies beyond the hill may be far less damaging than what is within your walls.

--Ashley Havey

TIFF 2011 | Future Lasts Forever by Özcan Alper

TIFF The Toronto International Film Festival is the leading public film festival in the world, screening more than 300 films from 60+ countries every September.Contemporary World Cinema
Future Lasts Forever Gelecek Uzun Surer by Özcan Alper

Özcan Alper’s second feature film is many things. Visually, it is a stunning work, featuring some of the finest cinematography I have seen this year and capturing the unique Turkish countryside in its many moods. It is also a love story with a twist, as one half of its central couple is absent for virtually the whole narrative. And to give the film an extra dimension and edge: it confronts the Kurdish reality within Turkey.

Future Lasts Forever is an achingly reflective road movie (with a few inside references to one of the masters of this form, Wim Wenders), tracing a young Turkish woman’s voyage to find her Kurdish lover, who has left to take up the fight of his people. Sumru (Gaye Gürsel), an ethnomusicologist armed with a tape recorder, decides to find and record the elegies, or testimonies, of Kurdish survivors of Turkish atrocities. These are eloquently delivered, mostly by women whose men have been killed — often right before their eyes. But the underlying reason for Sumru’s trip is to find the man who claimed her heart.

At her first stop, the city of Diyarbakir, Sumru meets another man who shares her interests, and soon the two find themselves spending more and more time together. But Alper confounds narrative expectations: even as this new couple continues their voyage together, romantic involvement is not his focus. Instead, his attention rests on people trapped in the past, fumbling to make sense of events that have changed their lives. The silent, enduring landscape is always there, a kind of mute witness to the living and the dead. How can such tragedy exist amid so much beauty?

A film of memories — personal, collective and historic — Future Lasts Forever marks the maturation of an exciting new Turkish talent. Alper pauses and observes, creating quiet emotional moments of devastating power as his heroine moves closer and closer to solving the mystery of her lover’s disappearance.
Piers Handling

Özcan Alper was born in Artvin, Turkey. He studied physics and history of science at Istanbul University. His feature films are Autumn (08) and Future Lasts Forever (11).


Country: Turkey/France/Germany
Year:2011
Language: Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Hemshince
Runtime: 108 minutes ; Format:DCP(D-Cinema)
Executive Producer: C. Asli Filiz ;Producer: Ersin Celik, Soner Alper
Production Company: Nar Film[1] /Unafilm/Arizona Films
Principal Cast: Gaye Gursel, Durukan Ordu, Sarkis Seropyan, Osman Karakoc, Erdal Kirik
Screenplay:Özcan Alper; Cinematographer:Feza Caldiran; Editor: Ayhan Ergursel, Thomas Balkenhol, Özcan Alper, Umut Sakallioglu; Sound: Mohammed Mokhtary; Music: Mustafa Biber; Production Designer:Tolunay Turkoz

A film of memories, we follow a young ethnomusicologist who leaves Istanbul in search of her Kurdish lover. Along the way she records testimonies of Kurdish survivors, meets a young man who shares her interests and gradually gets closer to resolving what has happened to her friend.

[1] Nar Film was founded in 2009 by Özcan Alper, Ersin Çelik and Soner Alper. 'Autumn', the previous film of Özcan Alper was also included in the line-up of Nar Film after its foundation. Nar Film produced the new project of Özcan Alper, 'Future Lasts Forever'.

Nar Film plans to continue to produce feature and documentary films and intends to provide production services to the international projects as well as bringing art-house international films to a Turkish audience.
NAR FILM
Caferağa Mah. Sarraf Ali Sok.
Kaan Apt. No:25 / 3, Kadıköy / İST / TR
T (+90) 216 418 42 06 | F (+90) 216 336 26 34 | info@narfilm.com

Sonbahar at New Directors/New Films 2009

Autumn / Sonbahar
Series: New Directors/New Films 2009
Director: Özcan Alper, Country: Germany/Turkey, Release: 2008, Runtime: 99

This stunning elegy to lost youth and lost ideals follows Yusuf, just released from prison and headed to the majestic mountains of the eastern Black Sea region where he grew up. Without any friends or community left from his politically involved youth spent in the big city, he moves back into his mother’s small shack on the mountainside and tries to reconnect to the landscape of his childhood.

Sick and dispirited yet eager to believe in the possibilities of the future, he forges a tentative bond with a young local boy and an emotionally powerful connection with another outsider, a Georgian prostitute whose life is also waylaid by the shattered dreams of Socialist utopia. Özcan Alper’s debut is a powerfully realized inner journey that evinces an especially profound talent for the lyrical use of landscape to express belief in the human spirit.

Alper's Sonbahar at New Directors/New Films program

Film Festival: The City as Bane, Nature as Balm By A. O. SCOTT
Published: March 26, 2009

As usual the New Directors/New Films program, a joint presentation of the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center that runs through April 5, is a hotbed of stories: a few of them predictable, some of them elusive, many of them sad. But what might resonate longest in the mind, sampling this international gathering of first and second features, are not narratives but landscapes.

The plot of Ozcan Alper’s “Autumn,” [1] for example, might be described as a shard of Chekhov translated into Turkish. A former student radical, after serving time as a political prisoner, returns home to his village on the Black Sea coast of northern Turkey. In the nearby town he develops a wary, stricken infatuation with a prostitute from across the border in Georgia, who seems to return his interest with equal wariness. But their romance, if you can call it that, is framed, indeed overwhelmed, by the dour grandeur of the forested mountains, the crashing of the surf and the silence of the snow.

It’s not that the sublimity of the scenery distracts from the psychology of the characters, exactly. But the use of the natural world to bring a sense of unspoken meaning to their actions is the most interesting aspect of “Autumn.” The film’s themes of regret, spent passion and misdirected desire show the influence of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey’s ambassador to the international festival circuit, but its creative energy resides in the way it captures nature.

[1]
Directed by: Ozcan Alpher
Cast: Nini Levaja, Serkan Keskin, Gulefer Yenigul

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Review Summary

When he was a student in Instanbul in the 1990s, Yusuf was sent to prison for political activism in the fight for democracy. Ten years later, he is released on the grounds of ill health and goes straight to his village, in the remote heights above the Black Sea, where the only person he finds is his sick mother. His father died during his imprisonment, and his eldest sister married and moved away. Apart from his childhood friend Mikhail, Yusuf is the only young man in the village. Economic problems have driven all the others into urban areas. One evening the two friends go to a bar in the nearest town and meet a Georgian prostitute, Eka, with whom Yusuf falls in love. The young man clings to this woman as his only hope. But for Eka, Yusuf is more like a character in one of the Russian novels she likes to read, a man from another world and another era. Ultimately, their relationship proves to be impossible.

Movie Details
Title: Autumn
Running Time: 101 Minutes
Status: Released
Country: Germany, Turkey
Genre: Drama, Foreign

Thessaloniki 49 | Autumn by Özcan Alper

Autumn / Özcan Alper
Sentenced to prison in 1997 as a university student at the age of 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 prison 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 the circumstances are right for these two people from different worlds. Even so, love becomes a final desperate attempt to grasp life and elude loneliness.
Director:	Özcan Alper
Script:	Özcan Alper
Photographer:	Feza Çaldiran
Montage:	Thomas Balkenhol
Sound:	Mohammed Mokhtary
Music:	Yuri Rydahencko, Ayşenur Kolivar, Sumru Agiryürüyen, Onok Bozkurt
Art Direction:	Canan Çayir
Actors:	R. Gulefer Yenigül (mother), Serkan Keskin (Mikail), Onur Saylak (Yusuf), Megi Koboladze (Eka)
World Sales:	Media Luna Entertainment GmbH, Germany T. +49 221 801498 F. +49 221 80149821 info@medialuna-entertainment.de www.medialuna-entertainment.de
Producer:	F. Serkan Acar, Kadir Sözen
Production:	Kuzey Film Production
Production Country:	Turkey, Germany
Co-production:	Filmfabrik Spiel-und Dokumentarfilmproduktion
Type:	35mm Color
Duration:	106'
Production Year:	2008

Özcan Alper

Director

Özcan Alper

Filmography 2001 Grandmother (short) 2002 Voyage in Time with a Scientist (short doc.) 2005 Rhapsody and Melancholy in Tokai City (short doc.) 2008 Sonbahar/Autumn Biography He was born in Artvin, Turkey in 1975 and 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 feature filmand TV productions. He directed a short fiction, "Grandmother", and two short documentaries, "Voyage in Time with a Scientist" and "Rhapsody and Melancholy in Tokai City".

2008 Sarajevo Film Festival | Autumn (Sonbahar) by Ozcan Alper

Autumn

Sonbahar
Turkey/Germany, 2008, colour, 106 mins

* Director/Screenplay: Özcan Alper
* Photography: Feza Çaldiran
* Editor: Thomas Balkenhol
* Art Director: Canan Çayir
* Sound: Mohammed Mokhtari
* Music: Yuri Rydahencko, Ayşenur Kolivar, Sumru Agiryürüyen
* Producers: F. Serkan Acar
* Production Company: Kuzey Film Production
* Cast: Onur Saylak, Raife Yenigül, Megi Kobaladze, Serkan Keskin, Nino Lejava, Sibel Öz, Cihan Çamkerten, Serhan Pir, Yaşar Güven

There were two films playing in the 2008 Sarajevo Film Festival revolving around the subject of a recently released convict trying and largely failing to resume a normal life - the other was Thanos Anastopoulos’ Correction (διόρθωση, Greece, 2007). Of the two, Özcan Alper’s feature debut Autumn was the more accomplished work, not least thanks to Feza Çaldiran’s ravishing landscape photography ensuring that there was plenty to look at even when the narrative ran out of steam in the final act.

The film begins with Yusuf’s release from prison, having spent ten years behind bars for his involvement in political protests while at university. He’s released on health grounds, and we’re told at the start that his lungs are barely functioning, signalling in advance that the events of the film will merely be a brief coda to a short life, a third of which was spent incarcerated. He moves back in with his elderly mother in a remote village in the mountainous region of eastern Turkey, and rapidly discovers that aside from the young schoolboy Onur (with whom he strikes up a brief rapport over the latter’s maths homework: Yusuf was a promising mathematician before fate intervened), virtually all the local inhabitants are from his mother’s generation due to the lack of opportunities, and he’s warned that if he stays with them he’ll become like them.

But despite an apparent job offer from his friend Cihan’s magazine, Yusuf does indeed stay with them, his mindset demonstrated by him tuning out the chatter of fellow villagers awaiting a minibus to stare at a slug on the ground (he later claims that everything moves too fast for him outside prison). His old friend Mikahil lives nearby, and attempts to liven things up by taking him out for the evening with two Georgian prostitutes, Maria and Eka, but instead Yusuf ends up having a long heart-to-heart with Eka about her own life as a single mother to a four-year-old girl.

Both similarly damaged by circumstances outside their control, Yusuf and Eka seem made for each other, but the distance between them seems unbridgeable by psychological issues that he can’t put into words, and which she lacks the Turkish to express (a revealing post-lovemaking shot sees them both curled up in a foetal position, simultaneously close and distant). He tries to take up music again after restoring a set of Turkish bagpipes, but his lungs aren’t up to the job - and it’s only a seemingly ill-advised trip to the top of the mountain accompanied by a reluctant Mikahil that gives him any kind of fulfilment.

Hints of Yusuf’s experience in prison are conveyed through brief video footage (random flashbacks can be triggered by anything, even slippered feet on a carpet take on the sound of hobnails on concrete) and overheard television news items about dangerous and insanitary conditions, but Alper generally eschews direct political comment - the only details of Yusuf’s “crime” are conveyed via cryptic one-liners delivered by others: he “wanted socialism”, he “got mixed up in this anarchist business”. While inside, his father died and his sister married and moved away, meaning that Yusuf becomes the primary focus of his mother’s life, and subjected to yet more pressure to marry and settle down.

But the narrative content generally plays second fiddle to some gorgeous images, usually framing Yusuf against the flora and fauna of the village hills. Autumn is signalled by a single yellow leaf drifting past a wooden window frame, and encroaching winter by a fog-blanket settling lower and lower down the slopes. A late encounter between Yusuf and Eka becomes a study in shades of blue, a funeral sees a red coffin carried along a snow-blown mountain path, while a beach encounter at sunset sees the screen split into three strips: deep orange sky, reflected by the texture of the water, the shore in the foreground almost black.

Towards the end, Alper overdoes it somewhat - a scene where Eka complains that Yusuf is like a character from a Russian novel feels like a scriptwriter’s contrivance, and a shot of Yusuf standing on a platform looking out to sea as the waves crash around him would be overwrought even without the swelling orchestral music - though this upping of the visual melodrama is possibly in self-conscious compensation for the fact that the narrative has almost entirely fizzled out by this stage. But for a debut, it’s a very promising piece of work, and it’ll be interesting to see where Alper goes from here.

Posted on 21st August 2008
Source:http://filmjournal.net/kinoblog/category/directors/ozcan-alper/

Montreal 08 | AUTUMN/SONBAHAR by Özcan Alper

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).