Film takes a haunting look at arranged marriages

‘Lal Gece’ (Night of Silence), director and writer Reis Çelik’s Crystal Bear winner in this year’s Berlinale, hits theaters this week. Most of the story taking place in the bridal chamber, the film is a haunting look at arranged marriages in Turkey. ‘Lal Gece’ is a one of many in a string of Turkish films on arranged marriages

A young adolescent girl locked in a room to have sex against her will with a much older man would be the definition of rape in many countries. Yet in some parts of rural Turkey it is merely standard procedure for a traditional arranged marriage.

Reis Çelik’s latest feature and Crystal Bear winner in this year’s Berlin International Film Festival Lal Gece (Night of Silence) follows a traditional arranged wedding in which the 60-something-year old groom is sent off to the bridal chamber with his 14-year-old bride to consummate the marriage by sunrise the next day.

The marriage is an arrangement to end the blood feud between two families and the groom, played by veteran actor İlyas Salman, has spent most of his life in prison for the murder, done as an honor killing, of his mother. The film’s director and writer Çelik layers in a look at another patriarchal tradition accepted in certain rural parts of Turkey with the addition of the groom’s honor killing to the plot. The young bride, played by newcomer Dilan Aksüt, is a fresh-faced teenager under her bright red wedding veil.

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Acclaimed filmmaker Kutluğ Ataman funds next film via web

Acclaimed filmmaker and contemporary artist Kutluğ Ataman may have advanced to the next stage in arts funding for his new film, ‘South Facing Wall’: crowd funding

When South Facing Wall, the fifth feature film by globally recognized Turkish filmmaker and contemporary artist Kutluğ Ataman, hits the theaters some time next year, there will be at least 153 individual funders proudly watching the film, some who have contributed 2,000 dollars, others merely two dollars.

Ataman has chosen Kickstarter, the U.S. crowd funding website for creative projects, as a major source for his upcoming movie, which will be filmed in the eastern province of Erzincan. The contributions from individual film aficionados will go directly to funding development and pre-production, help the production team shape the project from rewriting and research and include other aspects like location scouting and production design.

When you check the Kickstarter page for the project, you won’t see much on the filming details, nor about the cast and the crew. What you will see is a detailed account of the film, the story, and how the funding will work, including a five-minute video of Ataman himself talking about what he wants to achieve with his film.

“I want to make a film that talks about the everyday lives of individuals who live here and have not found proper representation in Turkish cinema,” Ataman says in the video to the potential (and hopefully actual) funders, referring to the people of eastern Anatolia.

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Karaoğlan, Turkish comic book hero returns to screen

Karaoğlan, the famous comic book hero of the 1960s, makes a comeback in the upcoming film, directed by Kudret Sabancı. The young Turkic warrior will once again fight his archenemy, Mongol leader Camoka, in the film to be released next January

Nationalist sentiments continue their invasion of Turkish pop culture as another Turkish hero saves Anatolia, this time from the Mongols. With some blatant and crude nationalism in recent Turkish cinema like the box office hit Fetih 1453 (Conquest 1453) and the action series Kurtlar Vadisi (The Valley of the Wolves), the news of the upcoming adventures of a Turkish hero on screen stirred quite some excitement last week.

Karaoğlan, veteran cartoonist Suat Yalaz’s beloved comic book hero, is getting ready for his screen comeback, riding his horse in the vast film set in Kemerburgaz in northern Istanbul. The hero is a young Turkic adventurer in his early 20s, and the literal translation of his name is the Swarthy Boy, referring to his trademark dark locks. The setting is 12th- and 13th-century Central Asia during the reign of Genghis Khan.

Karaoğlan was one of the most popular Turkish comic book heroes of the 1960s, dubbed the Heroes with Swords, all of them inspired by motifs from the histories and folklore of Turks, as well as Islam. The historic comic book heroes proved to be the darling of pop culture at the time, with more than 50 heroes hitting the stands at one time.

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Death by technology in film

Two new releases this week demonstrate the changing face of fear of technology in movies. While an ATM booth, mobile phones and cameras betray humans in one horror flick, in another a power outage becomes the ultimate source of horror. Here’s a look at technophobia in movies, which goes as far back as the early 1920s

Forwarding a private email to your boss could be the ultimate horror story. You might also harbor anxiety over someone tagging you on Facebook. Online shopping can be as scary, if you’ve heard stories of people’s credit cards being hacked. In fact, sometimes computers and emails, TV sets and credit cards can be much scarier than haunted houses, monstrous sharks, and psycho killers – at least on screen.

Two of this week’s new releases play on our anxieties about changing technology and our dependence on it. In director David Brooks’s ATM, three friends stop by an ATM booth to withdraw some cash, only to find themselves trapped in the ATM and their lives threatened by a hooded man waiting to kill them. While technology becomes a threat to their lives, it is also technology that offers them the chance of escape, in the form of mobile phones and cameras – which perhaps also let them down, fuelling even more fear of technology.

In Alexandre Courtès’ The Incident (released with the title Asylum Blackout in some countries), a group of unsuspecting people are stuck in a prison-like building with the criminally insane when a thunderstorm causes a blackout. Something as simple as a malfunction in electricity becomes the source of true horror in this French-American horror movie.

The fear of technology and its reflection in art, more specifically in fiction, is as old as, well, technology.

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