A Lament as White as Snow / Rasih Yılmaz
Automatically translated from Turkish. Read the original
2011.05.13
Bugün, Sineyorum
White as Snow, which returned with an award from the International ‘Sofia Film Fest’, one of the leading festivals of the European film world, opens in cinemas this week.
After watching White as Snow, I couldn’t help saying, “Can a story by Sabahattin Ali, one of the important writers of Turkish literature, really be this painful once it is turned into images?” At a time when the questions of what man lives by, or what man lives for, are melting minds as if doused in acid, White as Snow, directed by Selim Güneş, appears before us like an answer.
Like a lament of deprivation, of pain, but above all of hope, the frames that flow past us wrapped in cold draw the viewer into the humane journey of dignity that is ten-year-old Hasan’s struggle to survive with his two siblings.
A Poetic Life
The father is in prison, the mother works as a carer in the town. Hasan tries to sell the ayran he has made to drivers passing along the road on a mountaintop, in the cold of the snow.
Artvin’s impassable snowy forests, the ceaseless howling of wolves, the deprivation of an unattainable love and an endless sigh: this is White as Snow, a poetic manifesto of life.
White as Snow, in which all cinematic forms are applied perfectly, in which the screenplay, editing, acting, music and visual storytelling never once falter, and in which everything is brought in at exactly the right measure by a sincere spirit, settles over you like a Sufi quilt.
Which “Masnavi” could convey “contented surrender” as well as selling cold ayran on a snowy mountain does, anyway!
*****