Yurt: A great political and sensory film (review)
Portrait of a teenager torn between a secular environment and religious growth in Turkey in 1996, this first film is striking in its emotional force.
You have to get used to it: situating a film in the 1990s is now a historical story and a chronicle of a bygone past. This is the case for director Nehir Tuna, who here tells in a semi-autobiographical way the turning point of 1996 in Turkey through the story of Ahmet, a 14-year-old boy sent to a religious boarding school by his father who seeks to instill purity and righteousness in his son. But the particularity of Ahmet's daily life is that he attends a secular private school during the day where the ideological atmosphere is very different from that of the boarding school and the Koranic studies that he finds in the evening. Secularism by day and Islam by night: the adolescent's tension perfectly illustrates the deep division in Turkish society which emerged in the mid-1990s, a time when Islamist power entered political life and where brutal opposition shook the country. This backdrop is above all an opportunity for the filmmaker to paint a powerful portrait of a bustling adolescence where the young hero goes, between budding friendships, collective unrest and frustrated loves, to forge his own vision of the world and find his independence in environment of diverse and varied surroundings. Not shying away from any stylistic temptation (the intense black and white of the image gives way during the film to more dazzling colors), this reconstruction of an era with still-living consequences impresses with its energy and its sensory breadth.
By Nehir Tuna With Doğa Karakaş, Can Bartu Aslan, Ozan VSelik Duration 1h56. Released April 3, 2024
