From Literature to Cinema: A heartbreaking winter tale; White as Snow / Mehmet Erduğan

2022.03.19
Independent Türkçe

“Ayran”, a story by Sabahattin Ali, one of the best-known Social Realist writers of Turkish literature, stands out for its vivid narration and deserves to be read once more to discover the richness of its descriptions, which invite the reader into Hasan’s emotional world, and of its symbolic details. Now, as we live through a dark, harsh winter in March, I wanted us to remember once again “White as Snow”, the film that brings this story to the screen with striking imagery.

A heartbreaking winter tale; White as Snow

Director: Selim Güneş / Cast: Hakan Korkmaz, Sinem İslamoğlu, Gürsan Piri Onurlu, Kaya Akkaya, Ziver Armağan Açıl, Ruhan Odabaş, Sinan Koçal

A heart-wrenching tale in the whiteness of the snow…

In this 2010 debut feature by Selim Güneş, who has been working in photography since 1989, Hasan lives in a small, remote mountain village. Because his father is in prison and his mother works as a servant in the township four hours away from the village, he has to look after his two younger siblings at home.

When his father, a master blacksmith, is jailed for his political views and the family falls into poverty, Hasan shoulders the whole burden of life at a young age. To feed his siblings he has to walk a long road every day and back again, summer and winter, come snow or storm, and he tries to earn money by selling ayran at the bus stop where he waits.

Hasan, a brave-hearted and courageous child devoted to his mother and father, sets out with a sense of responsibility in the frost of winter, in the early hours of the morning, carrying his jug full of ayran to the roadside tea house to sell ayran to the passengers of the passing minibuses.

Adapted for the screen by Selim Güneş from the short story “Ayran”, written in 1938 by Sabahattin Ali, one of the most valuable writers of Turkish literature, this heart-aching story of a single day in Hasan’s life tells of separations, waiting with longing, yearnings, regrets and the hope that exists in human life in spite of everything.

A jug of ayran

Sabahattin Ali preferred to convey his social messages through symbols, and his short story “Ayran”, included in the book Yeni Dünya, centres on a conflict between oppressor and oppressed born of economic injustice. Although White as Snow is adapted from this story, there are also many differences between the original work and the film.

From the very beginning, Sabahattin Ali set himself apart from the lyrical works that portrayed the Anatolian atmosphere in an epic, fairy-tale manner. In this work of his, the train, a symbol of civilisation, of modernism, of the iron age and therefore of industrialisation, feeds the subtext of the original story, while Selim Güneş’s adaptation, set in the present day, skilfully conveys to the viewer how people wrapped in deprivation and poverty cling to hope in spite of everything.

The film opens on a sunny day in a village of Artvin in the Eastern Black Sea region with a wedding scene: on one side people are making merry dancing the horon, on another girls and young men are drawing close to each other, on another women are cooking, and children are playing by the lake. But right in the middle of the celebration two gendarmes arrive, handcuff Halil and arrest him.

In this film Halil is the father of ten-year-old Hasan, the hero of the story, but since Sabahattin Ali mentions nothing in his story about Halil or about the father of the children, the film departs from the original story in this respect.

In the film, with the harsh winter that follows Halil’s imprisonment, Hasan’s mother finds a way out by working in the town as a carer for the mayor’s bedridden mother, but she can come to the house where her children live only once a week and can bring them food for just a few days.

So Hasan, despite his young age, has to take on the task of looking after his siblings. He begins struggling to survive with his two younger siblings in their house in the village, making ayran from the milk of the cow he tends and trying to sell it to passengers and drivers at a stop on the road outside the village.

Only if Hasan can sell a few glasses of ayran can he buy bread and take it home to his siblings.

The film frames one such day: on a cold winter day Hasan once again shoulders his jug, by now his only friend, and starts walking to the stop where the village roads meet.

With the jug filled to the brim with ayran in his hand and rubber shoes on his feet, he barely makes it to the roadside.

Again unlike the original story, the film broadens the tale by bringing new characters into the plot.

Recep, the owner of the tea house, and Kadir Dede, who has come to the tea house to sell pears, are among the characters added to the plot in detail.

Kadir Dede, a man who protects and looks out for Hasan, is someone living with regret because something he once said led to bad consequences he could never have foreseen; and just like Hasan, he is trying to earn his bread by selling the winter pears he has brought.

Recep, who works at this roadside tea house and lives in the single room next to it, was forcibly separated from his fiancée. He waits eagerly and obsessively for a letter or news from her, and the separation has also turned him into a withdrawn person. He spends almost all his time listening to an old radio and waiting for a letter to arrive.

There is also the driver of the minibus that sets off from the town centre, a wild, impulsive man who has sent his son off to military service. One of the passengers on the minibus approaching them is travelling, very reluctantly, to the town he has been posted to. A civil servant assigned to this town far from his home, he is filled with longing and unease whenever he thinks of the people he has left behind. The journey through magnificent nature, which we watch through the eyes of this civil servant riding the minibus to the region he has been posted to, gives the viewer an idea not only of the natural beauty of the area but also of its harsh conditions and the texture of life there.

While waiting at the stop for the minibus, Hasan passes the time mostly thinking about memories of his mother and the things he lived through in the summer.

Waiting in the cold all day, Hasan keeps thinking of his siblings’ eyes, which look at him with hatred whenever he comes home empty-handed, and when the minibus finally arrives he leaps up excitedly and runs to sell the ayran in his jug as quickly as he can.

Growing more and more panicked as he thinks of his siblings, Hasan shouts with all his strength, “Fresh ayran!”

At last one of the minibus windows opens, and the man who has been posted to a village he does not know calls Hasan over to ask for ayran. After drinking two glasses, the man gives him one lira and asks for change, but Hasan has no coins to give him. As the minibus is about to leave, the man who drank the ayran asks for his money back, and Hasan returns it without hesitation; as the minibus slowly pulls away, the man asks Hasan to let it go with his blessing.

Meanwhile, as the snow begins to fall harder and harder, Hasan crouches on the side of the tea house sheltered from the snow and, so that he can take bread home, has no choice but to keep waiting for the minibus to come back or for the few other vehicles passing along the road.

Elsewhere, Hasan’s mother is disturbed by a dog howling several times and, on a sudden decision, sets off back to the village to be with her children.

While Hasan keeps waiting at the stop, a few vehicles go by, but none of them stop either.

Finally the minibus comes back and Hasan again runs up to it trying to sell ayran, but not a single person wants any. The minibus driver Sinan, for his part, at last gives Recep the letter he had not been able to hand over because he knew what the answer was, and knew it was no.

In the end Hasan decides there is no point in waiting at the stop any longer, gets up and sadly sets off for home.

On the way back, worn out by hunger and cold, Hasan panics, unsettled too by the sounds of wolves drawing closer and closer. He leaves behind his rubber shoes stuck in the mud and starts running in panic, but the sounds keep getting nearer. After a while he also drops the mug and the jug he is holding.

Whatever he does in the slushy snow, he cannot move as fast as he wants, and he simply gets stuck in the mud. In the snow and mud Hasan opens his palm: there is a marble in his hand. He cleans it and looks at the marble, which is the same colour as his mother’s eyes.

He gets up again, picks up his jug and takes out his pocketknife. As he swings his knife into the darkness he hears his mother’s voice and looks back, and the film ends with his mother’s second call and scream.

A hope that never ends

Through a single day’s slice of a small child’s hard life, Selim Güneş blends together in this film the hope captured in the saying “Where there is life, there is hope”; the struggle of a young mother caring for her children alone, and the love expressed in her waiting for her imprisoned husband; the longing of a jailed father and the pain he feels over his family’s situation; a young villager forcibly separated from his beloved, waiting passionately and living through intense feelings about abandoning and being abandoned; a young man going to work far from home who is afraid of being alone yet makes no effort not to be; an old villager troubled by the plight that innocent people have been forced into because a young man he informed on went to prison; and the regrets that arise from these people’s relationships with Hasan. He succeeds in conveying all of this to the viewer with impressive cinematography, within the atmosphere created by Artvin’s magnificent nature and its warm-hearted people.

With the eye he brings from photography, Selim Güneş builds the film’s visual language by shooting almost every sentence of the script as a shot. Considered, meaningful visual transitions add to the film’s visual impact.

In this film of sparse, essential dialogue, Selim Güneş prefers to convey events and emotions to the audience mostly through the unfolding of events and the actors’ performances, and he also gives the film a distinctive originality by placing certain passages of the folk songs he uses throughout the film as dialogue.

Through the powerful descriptions in Sabahattin Ali’s story Ayran, light, colour and sound come flawlessly alive in our minds, while the animal sounds and Hasan’s inner voice in a dark atmosphere make the reader feel the fear of that moment as well.

Accompanying this adaptation in keeping with the film’s pace, sounds such as the cow’s noisy footsteps, the creak of a door, the wind, the flow of the stream, Hasan’s shuffling feet and the howling of wolves set the rhythm of the film, much as they do in the story, and give movement to the plot.

And “snow” and “wind” in particular are used almost like actors in the film, as elements that tie together all the relationships and events in the story.

The white horse in the story, meanwhile, becomes a symbolic detail that draws attention to the struggle being waged, to being cast out in life and, together with the lack of value given to humanity, to the way a little child’s freedom is taken from him and he cannot live his childhood like other children.

*****

Note: The film, screened in the “World Cinema” section of the 46th Chicago Film Festival, also won the Best Film Music Award at the 47th Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, the Special Jury Award at the 15th Sofia International Film Festival, and the Second Best Film, Most Promising Screenwriter and Best Supporting Actress awards at the 22nd Ankara International Film Festival.

*** https://www.indyturk.com/node/485926/türkiyeden-sesler/edebiyattan-sinemaya-yürek-acıtan-bir-kış-masalı-kar-beyaz