White as Snow / Olkan Özyurt

2012.02.10
arkapencere.com, Issue 120

Sabahattin Ali was found dead in a forest one April day… He had been killed at the age of 41 by the ‘hitman’ Ali Ertekin. It was a suspicious death; his ideas and his writings had disturbed certain people. But who these people were was never brought to light. That is why Ali’s murder is considered one of the first unsolved political killings in the history of the Republic.

Hasan, the main character of ‘Ayran’, one of the stories Sabahattin Ali left us, also dies in a forest. What kills him is poverty. Hasan’s aim is to be able to buy dry bread for his siblings, and to do so he crosses the forest to the train station and sells ayran… But one day he cannot reach that goal, and he dies in the forest.

Director Selim Güneş deserves praise from the very start for bringing Ali’s story ‘Ayran’ to the screen with the film “White as Snow” at a time when the ties between our cinema and our literature have grown very weak. Güneş, who has written a screenplay true to the spirit of the story, also enriches it by adding a number of characters and moving the events to the 1970s. Poverty causes Hasan’s death, but is no one else responsible for that death? By putting this question to us, Güneş underlines that poverty, too, is created by people.

Besides this successful move in the screenplay, the area in which Güneş really succeeds is direction. Drawing on his background as a photographer, Güneş manages to build a strong visual atmosphere. Mircan’s music also adds to the film’s dynamism. Selim Güneş puts in a good performance with this first film and leaves us curious about his second.

Frankly, in our film world, which these days prefers not to concern itself much with the lives of poor people, director Güneş and his film “White as Snow” give us reason to hope. And on top of that, Güneş reminds us once again of Sabahattin Ali, one of the finest short-story writers in our literature…

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