Football film from promising Turkish director scores big

Award-winning actor Volga Sorgu takes the role of writer and director this time with his football film ‘Kaledeki Yalnızlık’ (Loneliness in the Goal). Starring Numan Çakır, Tolga Sarıtaş and Nur Sürer, Sorgu’s debut feature proves to be a promising foray into storytelling as he uses football as a powerful and subtle metaphor for all things in life

When a football team loses 8-0 in director and writer Volga Sorgu’s debut feature Kaledeki Yalnızlık (Loneliness in the Goal), we know the film will not be about the team but the goalkeeper. The eight goals also show the audience the film will be about the protagonist’s despair and his sense of loss, with football being the metaphor for life with all its ups and downs.

In a perfect case of art imitating life, ex-goalkeeper Numan Çakır, who had to quit his two-decade career following a traffic accident, plays Nurettin, a goalkeeper who loses his wife and a bright future in football after a traffic accident. Left with his teenaged son Feyyaz (Tolga Sarıtaş), he continues playing in an amateur team, led by the shady club chair (Erkan Can), hoping to climb up to the bottom of the professional ranks, the third tier.

From the very first minutes, the film touches on diverse subjects such as coping with death, dysfunctional family relations, class differences, the decay of urban life, poverty, fraud and even touches on the lives of third-generation migrant Turks in Germany. Football as a metaphor nearly brushes all of these themes, the major one being the heavy burden of being a goalkeeper in a team game.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)