FROM NEWS TO CINEMA Both of today's guests at the Golden Orange National Feature Film Competition were productions inspired by news stories. After “Kesilmiş Bir Ağaç Gibi Noir” were screened, the film crews answered questions from the audience.

The 62nd International Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival welcomed two guests from the National Feature Film Competition today. Tunç Davut's “Kesilmiş Ağaç Gibi” and Ragıp Ergün's “Noir” were films that drew their stories from news reports but developed them through their own cinematic narratives.

The collapse of a middle-class family

Following the screening of the National Competition film “Kesilmiş Bir Ağaç Gibi” at the AKM Aspendos Hall, a discussion took place with director Tunç Davut, producer-screenwriter Sinem Altındağ, co-producer Can Yılmazer, and actors Feyyaz Duman, Selen Kurtaran, Dilan Düzgüner, Muttalip Müjdeci, and Muhammed Muhammed, who answered questions from the audience.

Retired engineer Refik, who cannot experience a true sense of ‘family’ with his son, who only has a relationship with him for money, and his daughter, who plans to settle abroad, embraces Syrian refugee Nesrin and Nesrin's children as his own family. Learning that his son and daughter gave Nesrin money so they could escape to Europe, and that Nesrin disappeared, leaving her children behind, triggers the crisis.

Director Tunç Davut said he came across the film's subject in a news report: "There was a report about the suicide of a Syrian migrant. I tried to find footage related to the news; this is what it showed: a security camera in an alleyway looking toward the intersection where the street opened up. A man was seen crossing the four-way intersection and stopping in the middle of the road. There was a large maintenance hole cover; he lifted it and threw himself inside, to everyone's astonished gaze. We saw the fire department arrive, the entire road being dug up, and his lifeless body being found."

Davut stated that while working on the script, they felt the need to look at immigrants and the social structure, saying, “Thus, the story began to take shape around family relationships, othering, social structure, class divisions, and conscience, and we tried to tell the story of an old man's moral reckoning and the collapse of the middle-class family structure.”

Yıllar önce yine Altın Portakal’da tanıştığı Tunç Davut’la dengeli bir çalışma gerçekleştirdiklerini dile getiren oyuncu Feyyaz Yıldırım, “Tunç hoca bize oyun anlamında alan açtı ama neticede biz, hikâyenin bir parçasıydık. Doğaçlama da kattık ama tabii yönetmen tarafından belirlenen zorunlu sınırlar vardı” dedi.

“Sanat da kadın cinayetleri de stilize edilecek konular değil”

The National Feature Film Competition film “Noir” is director Ragıp Ergün's attempt to make an original statement about art and female murderers. A director who plans to settle on a remote, deserted island far from Istanbul and shoot his farewell film for the cinema suddenly becomes the target of a lynching attempt when he cries at the funeral of a girl he doesn't know. Following the screening of the film at the AKM Aspendos Hall, a discussion was held with director Ragıp Ergün, producer Özlem Öçalmaz, and actors Cansel Elçin, Nazan Bayazıt, Erol Babaoğlu, Ceren Köse, Ece Gökçen, and Mesut Toprakaran.

“I had only one choice: to make a mark on time,” said the director, explaining his words as follows: "I believe that art must somehow leave a signature or a mark on the spirit of the times. In Noir, this choice involved the following dilemma: Should I make cinema or entertainment? Or should I make a mark on time and continue on my way? I chose the latter. Because female murders are not a subject that can be trivialised or stylised.“

It was a news story that first prompted Ergün to take action. However, the director, who stated that he found the news story's account of the incident to be ‘stylised,’ said, ”If I had done that, I wouldn't have found peace." Ergün also said he preferred to address the issue independently of the location, adding, “Because it really hurt me to attribute these problems to Turkey, to our own people, to our own land. In a way, that's why I didn't want to change the original English Shakespeare text at the beginning. When asked about the distance felt between the characters throughout the film and its counterpart in the actors, Cansel Elçin was the first to speak: "One of the most important things for me is that the film has its own language. The film belongs to the director. Whether we act well or poorly, the director is God there; he cuts here, pulls there, directs us as he pleases. That's how it was in this film, too."

Nazan Bayazıt, on the other hand, said they worked with her “favorite method”: "What actors love most is this: they are given the logic of the scene and the character, and then they are set free. In other words, we weren't slaves to a script, word for word, letter for letter. The director explained the world of the film to us, and we took that world and dressed the characters. I am already a mother and I have a child. So playing the mother in the film was easy for me, but I struggled to play the loss of a child."