The Summit Where Emotion Meets the Visual: White as Snow / Eray Ergün
Automatically translated from Turkish. Read the original
2010.10.10
blog.milliyet.com.tr
The turning points of your life may come to mind when, from a high hill, you see the road winding through all that white…
When the door of the wooden shack opens, your dreams, your hopes, your beginnings will come alive before your eyes, or you will think to yourself, “Should I make a new beginning?”, who knows…
As the millstone slowly turns and grinds the harvest, perhaps you too will begin to grind your sorrows…
When half of a log burned to embers in the wood stove breaks off and falls to the floor, you may suddenly remember the fragile things in your life…
Each time someone angrily strikes the wooden table, your veins may swell along with the grain of the table, as you remember the old and the new and live the moment…
The book swept along by the river raging through the whiteness may carry you somewhere; that is, if you have managed to come back yet from where the sparks flying off the hammered axe took you…
When you see the clothes pegs on the washing line swaying in the force of the wind, the ups and downs of your life may come to mind as well…
Will the red paint dripping from the paintbrush lying on the table become your tears? I cannot say…
You will decide on all of them when you watch the film, bringing them together with the meaning of the film…
The images I have tried to describe above belong to a film called White as Snow… Directed by Selim Güneş, the film is a screen adaptation of Sabahattin Ali’s story Ayran…
Shot in Maden Village in the Şavşat district of Artvin, the film tells of what Hasan, a child bound to life by his love for his mother amid the dead end of a small village’s poverty and deprivation, goes through as he tries to earn money by selling ayran, and of the reckonings of the people around him with life and with themselves.
Director Selim Güneş also wrote the script… A photographic artist and member of İFSAK, Güneş has nourished emotions with visuals and produced a successful work.
Carrying the experience of photographic art into the holistic texture of cinema and bringing this beautiful and meaningful story to the big screen, Güneş has cast actors trained in theatre and the performing arts, and has also given roles to local people… Hakan Korkmaz, the 11-year-old who plays Hasan, one of the leads, was born in Borçka, Artvin, and this is his first acting experience.
The director of photography of this visual masterpiece is Serdar Özdemir… A graduate of the Cinema-TV Department of Dokuz Eylül University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, Özdemir has worked hand in hand with the director to weave the images with a painter’s finesse…
Set in the early seventies, this film aims “to take the audience on a journey through time by shedding light on the vicious circles and atmosphere of an era”, and with its story, its emotional depth, its images crafted frame by frame and its Golden Orange-winning music, it will stay with you… Don’t miss Hasan, who finds his only way to feed his siblings in selling ayran whatever the snow and cold, shouldering his ayran jug; Halil the blacksmith in his prison ward; Recep the tea seller passing the time with the folk songs he listens to on the radio while waiting for word from his beloved; and the cries of the mother searching for Hasan, lost in the forest, mingling with the howling of the wolves!
*****