White as Snow / Nuray Coşan Temiz

2011.04.15
festivallik.blogspot.com.tr

Monsoon rains in April, it seems… What rain! I was late, in fact terribly late. Racing up the metro stairs three, five at a time. To save time, I squeezed into the crowd to go up by lift. Out of breath… We piled in. Even if the sign says 13 people and 200 kg, it won’t budge… Amid the waiting and everyone eyeing one another, someone said ‘we’re not moving’. Inside, I’m boiling over: ‘the film’s starting, folks, they won’t let me in.’ I was burning up, suffocating. Maybe I could watch it later when it’s released, but I can’t miss this one screening that the director is coming to as well! Who am I even telling this to… Besides, the audience has already been let into the hall. By the time I get out of this lift, the adverts will be over too.

And on top of that, it isn’t even at Fitaş but all the way over at Atlas. There’s no way I can make it; or rather, nothing short of flying will get me into that hall in time. Oh, ugh… I promise, I promise a thousand times over, to set off an hour early next time… If I can just get through this one.

After I pressed the emergency button a few times, the lift door opened, two people got out, and anyway, we were able to move again. Outside it’s like India. The rain is falling beautifully, so very beautifully, without a break.

I started running, umbrella in hand. Maybe there’s hardly anyone on the street, but still… Run Lola Run… When I reached the door of the Atlas, I saw a couple coming back down the stairs. I ignored the sign that I wouldn’t be let in. Although the young woman on duty tried to point to the notice board as tall as she was (surely it said something nice for latecomers, but I’m not one of them), I said I had to get in. There’s another middle-aged lady right there too, clearly a foreigner, as far as I could tell from her red raincoat and her very colourful jewellery. A brief war of words… Just as I was thinking that nobody could help any more, Azize Tan came down the stairs, and all I caught was a hand gesture meaning “go on in”; the words “but be quiet” only reached my ear afterwards. Together with the lady beside me, without even waiting for our ticket stubs to be torn, we threw ourselves into a suitable box. People’s names define them, or so I somehow believe… I don’t think I managed to say anything to Azize Hanım at that moment; endless thanks for all her hard work and for her kindness today.

On WHITE AS SNOW…

Ayran is a story Sabahattin Ali wrote in 1938, and it is still being lived today. That evening I heard on the news that one of two women attacked by wolves in Kütahya was like Hasan… Classic works are like that; in spite of time they describe the same fabric, even if places and names change; around here, everyone has run into a bear at some point.

Everything takes place under the snow in Artvin’s magnificent nature. The whole weight rests on Hasan: two little siblings waiting for him to bring home a morsel of dry bread, a mother who works in someone else’s house in the township and comes home just once a week, and a father imprisoned far away. Summer or winter, his only means of making a living is to sell the ayran in his copper jug to the passengers at the stop. In summer it’s one thing, but in winter, under the snow, ice-cold ayran is hardly in demand. That’s hope for you! What won’t it make a person do…

Although a village in Artvin may seem so very far from the rest of our country, the news bulletins heard on the radio connect it, and similar attitudes and anxieties can be felt. Is it because hardly anyone talks in the film that I feel such an urge to “talk” about it… The words of the poet who says “I keep thinking, how much we have died in order to live” also appear in the story. His only hope, the ayran in his jug, spills out over the snow…

And yet, perhaps because a photographer sits in the director’s chair (mind you, at such altitudes and in such harsh natural conditions, I doubt there is any chair for sitting in a corner and watching things unfold), every single frame is even more magnificent than a photograph.

As limpid as Sonbahar, a successful recent work that I watched twice, the clashes and the pessimism in the characters’ inner worlds amid the calm nature of the Black Sea form a contrast that stays with you.

Still, it would be unfair not to say this: even if nature so magnificent that even a blind man shooting it could win an award made the cinematographer’s job easier, it has at times released those gloomy inner worlds into the snow-white landscape like a wounded horse.

Well, while listening to the amateur lead actor, Hasan, or Hakan to use his real name, who didn’t neglect to mention that he is open to future offers, for a moment I felt as though I were listening to Kazım; that accent of his… Artvin, which has raised enlightened people, still gives life to its people through its streams that still flow, I think.

Well, this was the only domestic production I chose at the festival this year, and of course I have nothing against the others, but my vote goes to this work.

*****

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