White as Snow / Murat Erşahin
Automatically translated from Turkish. Read the original
Sinema Dergisi, June 2011
Poverty is not fate, it cannot be fate!
“White as Snow”, directed by Selim Güneş, is adapted from the story Ayran by Sabahattin Ali, one of the giants of our literature. We witness a heartfelt struggle for life in a mountain village in the eastern Black Sea, alongside characters wrapped in want and impossibility. The struggle of a little boy who tries to sell ayran to provide for his family, amid all the poverty of Anatolia and the remote silence painted in the white of a harsh winter, has been carried from the atmosphere of the 1940s to much later times. In fact, a timeless, symbolic narrative governs the exquisite winter photographs that recall paintings. It is the spiritual map of a ‘lonely’ geography and of a people. In a land of impossibilities, nature and harsh rules accompany a thousand and one obstacles.
A child who will never grow up, struggling with the realities he lives through. A mother’s cry, a reproach to the thing called ‘fate’. And yet hope, standing tall with great dignity. Made with a love of cinema, without self-importance, without shouting, well put together, full of human warmth: “White as Snow” is a good film.
May its road be open.