A heart-wrenching fairy tale in the whiteness of snow… / Güneş Özayten

2014.01.17
Görsel Kitaplık

“White as Snow” was adapted for the cinema in 2010 by director Selim Güneş from “Ayran”, a story by our renowned writer Sabahattin Ali. In the story “Ayran”, Sabahattin Ali tells the tragic tale of Hasan, a boy of 12 or 13 who lives in a mountain village under harsh conditions and is both mother and father to his two younger siblings. To be able to look after his siblings, Hasan walks through the forest every day with a copper jug in his hand to reach the roadside. If he can sell the ayran he has made himself and return home with enough money to buy bread, he is lucky. Every day he makes the trip there and back under hard conditions. Sometimes he cannot sell any ayran at all. “Ayran” is perhaps one of the most striking and most visual of Sabahattin Ali’s stories. So much so that the cold seeps into your bones, you feel on your skin the snow the boy wades through, sinking in and struggling out, the howling of wolves and jackals reaches your ears, and you shiver. You live the desolation of the story, the human struggle with nature and with harsh conditions.

People settling accounts with themselves

As for the film, it has a plain but striking visual style true to the spirit of Sabahattin Ali’s story. In the film, which was shot in the Şavşat district of Artvin, nature appears before us in all its majesty, its harsh conditions and its ruthlessness. The visuals are almost poetic, and nature plays a very large part in this, just as it does in the story. Besides Hasan’s struggle against harsh nature and the conditions of life, the film also offers glimpses into the lives of the people whose paths cross his at the roadside tea stall, and of his family members, telling of their own reckonings. The film is set in the 12 September period, and it opens during a village wedding, when Hasan’s father, a blacksmith who belongs to a leftist group, is taken away by the gendarmes after being informed on. Just as Selim Güneş paid attention to all the subtleties of Sabahattin Ali’s story, in the screenplay he wrote himself he chose to set the film against the backdrop of the 12 September period. When his father is put in prison, Hasan’s mother has to go to the town to work. The mother, who looks after an elderly woman, can come back to her village only once a week. The owner of the “tea stall”, the hut Hasan goes to every day, is a young man bound by unrequited love to the daughter of the headman of one of the nearby villages. This young man asks every minibus driver who stops by whether there is any news or a letter from his beloved. Another supporting character is a forest engineer who grew up in the city and has come to the region reluctantly because of his posting. In Güneş’s film, the characters’ loneliness, hopes, waiting and disappointments are presented with a poetic flavour. All of this is conveyed to the audience at times through “flashbacks” within the main story. The father who dreams of a better future and feels trapped in prison; the drama of the mother who is forced to leave her children in the village; the longing felt by Hasan, who cannot live his childhood, and the hope that lives within him despite everything; the young man whose last refuge is the “tea stall”; and the young, educated forest engineer who feels a complete stranger to everything, to its nature and its people…

Shades of blue besides white

It appears that, while writing the script, Selim Güneş also drew on other stories by Sabahattin Ali. The use of shades of blue in the film, besides white, is another element that supports its dramatic structure. As for the acting, a very plain style that never tips into exaggeration was chosen. Hakan Korkmaz plays Hasan, joined by Sinem İslamoğlu, Gürsan Piri Onurlu, Kaya Akkaya, Ziver Armağan Açıl, Ruhan Odabaş and Sinan Koçal. The film mostly uses music for a single instrument and a single voice. Towards the finale, it uses a very moving Laz folk song that also appears in the trailer. Let us also note that sounds such as the howling of the wind and the wolves, and the silence itself, are used like music in the film.

Awards

The film took part in many important national and international film festivals, such as Chicago, Almaty, Sofia, the İstanbul International Film Festival, the International Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival and the Ankara International Film Festival, and came back from them with awards. Cinematographically very accomplished, the film holds the viewer under its spell and makes them live Hasan’s tragedy, just as Sabahattin Ali, who was killed in the mountains of Kırklareli, did in his story “Ayran”. Despite its running time of 77 minutes, “White as Snow” is a film whose effect you will not easily shake off, one you will want to watch again and again, and each time you will feel the sharp cold of the snow on your face. The film’s DVD has been released by Tiglon. The DVD menu also offers Audio Description for the Visually Impaired under Special Features.

In our “Görsel Kitaplık” column, where we look at one film every week, we will continue to include examples from different periods of Turkish cinema. Because, when considering quality works of art, it is important to value the quality works that grow from our own soil, nourished by its very essence. Cinema, as an art, has always been the mirror of societies, countries, cultures and different periods, and it will continue to be so.

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