‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’

Islamabad

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Lok Virsa selected Turkish movie Once Upon A Time In Anatolia for screening at Mandwa Film Club on March 25 .

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is highly respectable and distinguishes film director from Turkey. His filmography reads impressive with notable titles. In 2011, the director took up a true story about search of a victim. One of the three screenwriters of the film, a doctor by profession, went himself through the ordeal. The event takes place around Anatolian steppe. The drama takes the audiences for a night out. It is going to be a hunt for a missing person. The film depicts sombre atmosphere and this goes on for over 150 minutes. We see many characters at work. They depict the social and moral baggage they must carry here. However, because of subject, the film would appeal to serious film goers, the festival audiences rather than casual audiences on diet of pure commercial films who are just looking for nothing but just entertainment.

The people we meet here are police officers and doctors, prosecutors and suspects of the tragedy. The drama builds up in the darkness of the night where all we have are headlights from three cars. When people cannot recall the site under question and investigation, the probe becomes almost impossible. This is a barren landscape where real events from the past (deception, betrayal and violence) are seen from a mature point of view. Everything from the beginning to the end revolves around death.

Everything here moves at a pace but that is the only way how investigation would go. As the end, draws closer and our characters head for home, this gradually brings the events to an end. The film has been made with rich visuals, grace and beauty, notwithstanding morbid and gruesome subject. The film succeeds in creating conflict and tension as everyone searches for the victim. This is all about life of a murder investigation without a formal or conventional story.

‘Once Upon A Time in Anatolia’ won prestigious Grand Prix at Cannes. It also won several other awards at Dubai, Karlovy and Philadelphia. It was Turkish submission for Best Foreign Film Academy Award but did not make it.

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