Death Is White as Snow / Hilal Çetinder

2011.05.13
filmmakarasi.com

‘White as Snow’, scripted from Sabahattin Ali’s famous story ‘Ayran’, the one that has affected me most, is the first feature film of Selim Güneş, whose path runs through photography. First unveiled at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, the film travelled from festival to festival and came back with awards. What is more, now that it has opened in cinemas, it is still continuing on the festival road. Scripted with variations but without breaking the original main story, the film brings to the big screen the predicament of Hasan (Hakan Kokmaz), the lifeblood of the story. The story, set in the 1930s in Balıkesir, turns its course, through timelessness, to the village of Maden in Artvin and, with a reference to 12 September, focuses on the eldest son of a family that has fallen apart after the father went to prison and is struggling to make ends meet.

While the mother tries to earn money as a live-in servant away from home, the task of looking after his siblings falls to Hasan. As Hasan, who covers the kilometres-long distance from his home on foot in merciless weather, sets out on the road with his ayran jug, both his livelihood and his playmate, the characters who exist in the side story lend support to Hasan’s hopes, wavering between rebellion and contentment.

The father (Gürsan Piri Onurlu) paces up and down his prison cell, the mother (Senem İslamoğlu) waits for her weekly work cycle to come round. While Grandpa Kadir (Ruhan Odabaş), with a burden of guilt around his neck, frets over selling a handful of pears, Recep the tea-maker (Ziver Armağan Açıl) keeps watching the road for the good-news letter from his beloved. But the scene-stealer of the film is nature, which spreads itself comfortably over the ground of the world in which Hasan flounders in poverty, perfectly beautiful and playing games with its dangers as if to say ‘everything has a price’.

Born in Artvin/Borkça just like director Selim Güneş, the young actor Hakan Korkmaz does not seem to have struggled at all in his first acting experience with his performance as Hasan, trying to provide for his family. The place of the dialogue, which is almost non-existent, is taken by the visuals and the music. The father, absent from the story, has been turned into a father imprisoned for a political crime and wrestling with his regrets, which, depending on one’s point of view, may perhaps also make some viewers uncomfortable. And the mother figure, who in the original is shunned by the villagers, has become a helpless mother working as a carer in a distant town. Its slow pace, the dominance of the music and the presentation, in the manner of a stage play, of the dangers that may come from nature as early as the first scenes may make it a little hard to get into the film. Indeed, the mystery that begins with the father’s arrest right after the wedding in the first scene may leave a question mark in viewers’ minds. But to me this mystery nicely conceals the ambiguity that runs through the film as a whole, and it is not at all bothersome by the end. Sabahattin Ali had already written the literary definition of poverty with his work; Selim Güneş practically paints its picture. The palpable helplessness and loneliness of every character, and the ending that will stick in your throat, hurt. It takes heart to turn such a story into a screenplay and bring it to the big screen. While just one day of the villagers struggling to survive amid deprivation, poverty and the stillness of time that refuses to pass is enough to make us feel stifled, knowing that all their days will in fact go on in the same way makes it even harder. Although it has its flaws and leans too much towards the visual, I think it is a successful first film… And finally, I say: let yourself go into the silence, into the hypnotising images.

*****

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