Silence, Snow, Hasan, Ayran and the Others… / Müjgan Yıldırım

2011.05.17
evrensel.net

Hasan walks in the snow, an endless road, stumbling and falling, sinking and rising. As he walks in the snow, he leaves a trace in the depths of your heart… When Hasan loses his friend, his hero Zagor, to the waters of the stream, your childhood is swept away after him too… The mother’s wordless gaze, Recep’s unattainable love, the flow of lives that affect one another without knowing of each other, the intertwining of hope and despair, of black and white, of snow and wolf, of life and death… Hasan walks in the snow, with his jug “Çiko”, his fresh ayran, the two pairs of eyes behind him, his cold hands and his dreams… As he walks, he makes our forgotten wounds bleed; as he walks, the white of the snow turns into a silent scream, knotted in the throat…

White, which is always the opposite of black; white, the colour of hope; white, the morning after the night; white, the symbol of peace; the dove is white, the colour of happiness; that is why the wedding dress is white; black is the colour of death, but isn’t white made of every colour… As Bülent Ortaçgil says, “White birds, black birds, may they not all be the same bird…” Director-screenwriter Selim Güneş’s film “White as Snow” is in fact a film of just such feelings, ebbs and flows, reckonings and returns to oneself… The director, who prefers the visual to dialogue, has perhaps set the audience free with the idea that “everyone has their own film”… He has made one film so that hundreds of films may come out of it… These are of course subjective thoughts, but one thing is certain: with this first film, Selim Güneş has touched our hearts… I was reminded of the Hungarian director of Turkish origin Can Togay, whom I interviewed years ago… In his film Gözden Irakta Bir Kış, he too told of a village cut off by snow and of life there, and he had said: “With my films, with my mind, I touch people’s hearts, but I don’t know how much right I have to do so…

The Nature of Artvin Meets Mircan’s Music

Selim Güneş has brought “Ayran”, one of Sabahattin Ali’s important stories, to the big screen by turning it into a script. After three years of desk work, he shot the film in Artvin, his own home region. In the film, which mostly uses actors from Artvin and Borçka, Hasan, who plays the lead, gives a truly accomplished performance. The film is still and visually driven, told through shifts between past and present, with images and music at the fore. It not only touches the heart but also manages to unsettle you in your seat…

The rhythm of White as Snow is set by sounds: the sound of the stream, of the wind, of the wolves… This is exactly where Mircan, who composed the film’s music, comes in. Mircan, who this year won the “Golden Orange” at the Antalya Film Festival for her music for “White as Snow”, truly sweeps you up out of the film and lets you fly… There are scenes in which it becomes the voice of the silence within us, the description of the word that cannot be spoken, the expression of the scream that cannot be let out, like a picture of eternity…

When the magnificent mountains, forests and streams of Artvin, chosen as the setting, are added to all this, a visual feast unfolds before you…

A Reference to 12 September…

With Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s film “Bulutları Beklerken” we had come to know the misty clouds of the highland pastures of the Eastern Black Sea… After Özcan Alper’s “Sonbahar” and Semih Kaplanoğlu’s award-laden film “Bal”, we had met Artvin, this northernmost, out-of-the-way corner of the Black Sea. With this film, Selim Güneş brings us face to face with the hardship of nature as much as with its beauty… We meet Hasan’s struggle, his father’s idealism, the indifference of the “stranger”, the mother’s silence, Recep’s impossible love and the informer’s pangs of conscience. Although Güneş stops time with this film, by making a reference to 12 September he also draws attention to a situation within a tangle of people who affect one another… Artvin, a highly political place before 12 September, became a place where, during and after 12 September, many people suffered, died, were killed and were subjected to torture. That is precisely why one of the links of the film (perhaps its most important link) was the character of Hasan’s father, who corresponds to an idealist blacksmith…

The detail of the film that affected me most is how closely our lives are bound to one another, the great consequences that small details and actions bring about in another person’s life… Selim Güneş says there is “hope” in his film and adds John Lennon’s words: “Where there is life, there is hope…” Somewhere, Hasans go on dying; somewhere, people add hope to hopelessness; somewhere…

Little Hasan, Battling Nature to Sell Ayran

As for what director-screenwriter Selim Güneş, who for many years framed life and stopped the moment as a photographer, wants to tell with this first film… We can briefly summarise its story as follows: White as Snow is the film of a little child who, burdened with the responsibility of looking after his siblings, goes from his mountain village to the roadside and back to sell ayran so that he can buy bread. Along the way we share his daydreams, dreams and memories, and watch his struggle with nature and with the wolves. The film tells of the waiting and fears of a young mother forced to look after her children alone, the longing and pain of the imprisoned father, a young villager waiting for news from the one he loves passionately, a young man who has gone to work far from home and fears loneliness, an old villager troubled by the situation innocent people have been forced into after the young man he informed on went to prison, and the situations that arise from these people’s relationships with Hasan.

The Festival Journey of ‘White as Snow’

“White as Snow”, which was in the competition section of the 47th Antalya Film Festival and won the “Golden Orange” award for Mircan’s compositions, then became the only film accepted into the “World Cinema” section of the 46th Chicago Film Festival. Besides these, the film, which also won several awards at the Ankara International Film Festival, has taken part, and continues to take part, in festivals such as the Los Angeles South East European Film Festival, the “Competition Section” of the Almaata International Film Festival and the 12th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival.

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