In an age when teenagers participate in talent campuses, and film school students have their workshopped short films premiere in Cannes, the possibility of a self-taught, self-financed 41-year-old making a splash on the festival circuit seems far-fetched. Then along comes Murat Firatoglu to bring some hope to all the starry-eyed late bloomers out there.
Inspired by a walk around a small Turkish town and made on a budget of just over $55,000 – with part of that coming from bank loans and the sale of his sister’s jewelry – One of Those Days When Hemme Dies is a visually arresting and delicately written piece that rivals any of the hothouse-grown directorial debuts bowing at festivals these days. Proving himself an auteur in the making, Firatoglu — who is a lawyer by profession — has already chalked up a series of award-winning festival appearances at Venice, Sao Paulo, Almaty and now Singapore.
Like the self-taught Korean filmmaker Park Jung-bum, who trained as a physical education teacher in university but pivoted to making visually idiosyncratic, social-realist films, Firatoglu also produces and stars in his own work. Audaciously, One of Those Days When Hemme Dies is miles away from the usual Istanbul-based cineaste universe. Here he plays Eyüp, a rugged, debt-ridden labourer who earns his living transporting and salting tomatoes on a farm in the sun-drenched southwestern plains of Turkey.
After a violent fracas with a foreman (the Hemme in the title) over his much-delayed pay, Eyüp storms off and hatches a plan to murder his foe. From there, he embarks on a journey in which his furious desire for vengeance recedes as he meanders down country roads, small town back alleys, lush gardens and barren grocery shops.
The gradual transformation of Eyüp’s demeanour is signposted in the film’s tonal shift. While things kick off as though in a Nuri Bilge Ceylan movie – albeit one that’s unfolding in broad daylight – the story is slowly taken over by the kind of humour and humanism inherent in the work of Abbas Kiarostami. It’s hard not to laugh at the many instances in which Eyüp is detained by his new acquaintances and subjected to a rambling monologue, and equally difficult not to be moved by the awkward silences punctuating his reunion with a woman who was probably a teenage lover from his past.
Working with the cinematographic trio of Nedim Dedcan, Semir Yildiz and Abdurrahman Öncu, Firatoglu conjures striking visual beauty out of the most mundane of activities (like sequences of back-breaking tomato picking in the fields that seem taken from real life) and the most banal of landscapes (as when Eyüp is slowly reduced to a small dot as he rides away on his rickety red motorcycle, or marches down passageways).
Eyüp’s own problems become less and less of an issue for him and the viewer as the film proceeds. As many a theorist has said about road movies, it’s always less about the traveller than the landscape he travels through. It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal Hemme doesn’t die, because that’s a red herring anyway. This is a film about one of those dog days in the life of an unlucky fellow, and the redemption and epiphany he – and we – get to experience as time passes. It describes how life must go on, with people standing side by side, as in the curiously framed wedding dances that bookend the film.
Director, screenwriter, producer: Murat Firatoglu
Cast: Murat Firatoglu, Sefer Firatiglu, Salih Tasci
Cinematography: Nedim Dedcan, Semir Yildiz, Abdurrahman Öncu
Editor: Eyyup Zana Ekinci
Sound designer: Emir Mugra Kazak
Production company: Nefes Film
World sales: Luxbox
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Asian Feature Competition)
In Turkish
81 minutes
