INTERVIEW / A story white as snow / Özlem Altunok

2011.04.14
Cumhuriyet newspaper

‘White as Snow’, which Selim Güneş adapted for the screen from Sabahattin Ali’s story ‘Ayran’, is at the festival today…

Audiences first met Selim Güneş’s first film, “White as Snow”, at the Antalya Film Festival. Adapted from Sabahattin Ali’s story “Ayran”, the film is both a tribute to the great writer and, to some extent, the life story of Güneş himself, who wanted to make cinema from this powerful story…

With a story set in Artvin just after a period of military coup, Güneş tells of a boy whose father is in prison and of his struggle against poverty and nature; yet what he describes is not the Black Sea region but a feeling familiar to us all. That little boy’s story is also a story of hope…

The director, whose plain language we can tell is also nourished by literature, most recently returned from the Ankara Film Festival with three awards for his first film. Today the film is screening in the National Competition of the İstanbul Film Festival…

When you think of the visual power of Sabahattin Ali’s stories, it isn’t hard to understand why they would be brought to the screen, but still, did you have any concerns at the outset when adapting “Ayran”?

What lay behind my idea of making a film based on “Ayran” was the effect the story had on me. A friend of mine once said, “‘Ayran’ leaves an effect like a bullet piercing your heart,” and that was exactly the effect it had on me. “Ayran” is a delicate story with very little dialogue; to convey that feeling, the visual side was going to play an important part in the film. Trusting the photographer in me, I began working on the screenplay and developing it.

In the screenplay, many characters stand out who aren’t in the story…

While developing the screenplay, staying true to the essence of the story, I added many autobiographical elements. The story is set in Balıkesir at the end of the 1930s; I adapted it to a more timeless period and to Artvin, where I spent my childhood. As children in Artvin, we too used to sell things by the roadside, fruit if not ayran. In short, I moved the story to a place where something similar is lived, in another part of Anatolia and in another form. I tried to tell Sabahattin Ali’s story about the responsibility on a child’s shoulders, conveying the same feeling while developing the period and the characters.

In a sense, one could say that you adapted your own life to the story, or the other way round, the story to your own life; and although the period can’t be pinned down exactly in the film, it gives the impression of being after 12 September…

In the story there is a father, but he is never mentioned. While answering the question of why the father is absent, I also changed the mother’s position. In the story the family is ostracised because the mother works as a prostitute; in the film, the reason for their exclusion is the father’s politics. This is something that really happened in Şavşat after 12 September, as in many other places. I didn’t call it 12 September in the film, but to show what it means for a person to be unjustly torn from their family, and the consequences of that, I made it clear that it was a post-coup period.

Clearly literature interests you as much as photography. We also come across many quotations in the film. The things that can offer you a solution just when you need them as the screenplay develops have to do with what you have accumulated over time.

I am particularly interested in Turkish literature and poetry. In the film there are quotations from Osman Şahin and Cengiz Aytmatov. Like the postman in the film “Il Postino” who reads Neruda’s poem to the girl he loves and then tells Neruda, “Poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it, but to those who need it”…

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