The brutal legacy of Turkey’s secret service casts a dark pall over a community in German-Kurdish writer-director Ayse Polat’s most accomplished feature to date, In the Blind Spot. A chilling tripart thriller that shifts perspectives as it plays with the inescapable pull of the past and its insidious legacy, the film dexterously links the story of a low-level security agent finding himself on the other side of the surveillance cameras to a deeper plot whose grip appears to reach from beyond the grave. With its bold take on state-sanctioned hit squads, In the Blind Spot is likely to create a firestorm at home but should find welcoming arms at international festivals.
Chapter 1 begins with a German film crew headed by Simone (Katja Bürkle), who’s making a documentary about the persistence of memory and the rituals used to keep loved ones close. They’ve come to eastern Turkey, in the area around Erzurum and Kars, to film Hatice (Tudan Ürper), an elderly Kurdish woman whose son was kidnapped 26 years earlier; in the hopes of bringing her son back, she makes his favorite soup every Friday, delivering it to the other villagers and waiting expectantly for her missing child to come through the door. Though just a small part of Polat’s film, this little story early on, shot with a sense of authenticity, gives a feeling of genuine emotional weight and makes real the consequences of the twisted story to come.
Surveillance shots clue in the viewer that Simone and co. are being watched from a black SUV as they meet with a lawyer, Eyüp (Aziz Çapkurt), whose nervousness should have tipped them off that something’s gone awry. When it becomes clear he’s been kidnapped, and they get a ransom note demanding political asylum in exchange for the lawyer, the team try to flee the country, but they’ve waded further into dangerous territory than they realized.
With each chapter, the narrative moves back somewhat, to fill in gaps and show the situation from another character’s perspective. Zafer (Ahmet Varli) is one of the shadowy figures watching the film crew yet he’s also secretly videoing his colleague’s actions while not realizing that he too is being observed. Various factors are making him paranoid: his Kurdish neighbor Leyla (Aybi Era) is the translator for the German crew, leading him to wonder if she’s a plant. More disturbing however is how his 7-year-old daughter Melek (Çagla Yurga, quite astonishing) seems to be haunted by an invisible man who tells her things she has no way of knowing previously. He, wife Sibel (Nihan Okutucu) and Leyla who’s teaching her English, all assume the little girl has dreamt up an imaginary friend, but her pronouncements are becoming more and more uncanny, and the child’s fear is palpable.
Melek very much takes hold of the film, her large dark eyes and uncanny stare a disturbing focal point as her father’s paranoia deepens and his actions become determined by desperation. His colleagues in the security service, including his mentor, seem to have his back, but he’s getting screen shots of his private life on his phone, and only the state itself is insidious enough to be behind this campaign of intimidation. The title In the Blind Spot is literal: Polat has filled the film with surveillance shots, to the point where we realize there is no real blind spot away from the cameras. But it’s also metaphorical, since the living characters too have blind spots, never imagining just how deep the state goes, while the dead inhabit a limbo place whose reach goes beyond what can literally be seen.
Part of the film’s success lies in the way Hatice’s early presence forces us to consider the decades-long trauma of oppression and state-sanctioned killings, starkly setting out the notion that just one unnatural death has a rippling impact that remains strong long after the event. Polat (En Garde) doesn’t give a history lesson about Kurdish oppression but rather allows it to shrewdly infuse the script, underlining the ways in which repression malignantly attaches itself to the social fabric and rips it apart. The chapter divisions are effectively used to give it all structure, which the terrific editing by Serhad Mutlu and Jörg Volkmar reinforces – it couldn’t have been easy to incorporate all those surveillance shots yet never does the film feel static or frayed. Credit also goes to d.p. Patrick Orth (Toni Erdmann) and his carefully observational camera, ever aware of the effects of watching and being watched.
Director: Ayse Polat
Screenplay: Ayse Polat
Cast: Ahmet Varli, Çagla Yurga, Nihan Okutucu, Tudan Ürper, Katja Bürkle, Aybi Era, Aziz Çapkurt, Max Hemmersdorfer, Vedat Güzel, Muttalip Müjdeci, Riza Akin.
Producer: Mehmet Aktas, Janna Heine
Co-producer: Ayse Polat
Cinematography: Patric Orth
Production designer: Osman Özcan
Costume designer: Ece Erol
Editing: Serhad Mutlu, Jörg Volkmar
Music: Martin Rott, Matthias Wolf
Sound: Johannes Grehl
Production companies: Mîtosfilm (Turkey), PunktPunktPunkt Filmproduktion (Germany), in association with WDR, Arte.
World sales: ArtHood Entertainment
Venue: Berlinale (Encounters)
In Turkish, English
118 minutes
