A small film crew consisting of two people and a translator is in the process of shooting a documentary in northeastern Turkey. They want to document a story about a young man who disappeared from his village without a trace. Their main contact is a lawyer (Aziz Çapkurt in the role of Eyüp) who seems quite friendly, but also seems to be under a lot of time stress. They meet on a somewhat busier street, but he surprisingly doesn’t have time to give an interview now. He asks Simone (Katja Bürkle), who is leading the documentary, to take a medicine to the village where the team wants to go to interview an elderly woman. The lawyer is only briefly filmed getting into his car and as he drives away, the camera pans to a black SUV in which there are two people. Shortly after the lawyer drives off, the SUV follows, but the film crew does not notice this.
Accompanied by the translator Leyla (Aybi Era), the film team then arrives in a Kurdish village. Here we learn a little more about the missing man whose picture hangs in the old woman’s apartment. He simply disappeared 20 years ago, the mother reports, and it was her eldest son. But she still does not give up hope that he will return one day. Especially for him, she cooks a special soup in the village square, which she distributes to all the people, only picking up one plate and placing it on the floor in her son’s room.
After the work is done, the team finally returns, visits various filming locations and they try again and again to get in touch with Eyüp. In a restaurant they finally succeed and get him in front of the camera for a short time, although he seems extremely restless. While the team is still talking things over, Eyüp begins a dialogue with the neighbor’s child that Leyla has brought along to keep an eye on her. Leyla stares at Eyüp for a moment and suddenly she starts talking about things that a child can’t really think up. This unsettles the lawyer and when his cell phone rings shortly afterwards, he excuses himself again and disappears once more at a fast pace. While the cameraman quickly follows the lawyer to film him leaving, Simone sits down with Leyla and little Melek (Çağla Yurga). When Simone talks to Melek and the little one shows no reaction, Leyla reports that Melek has an imaginary friend. Simone tells the child that she once had such a friend and whenever he appeared, she recited a special spell to make him disappear. She immediately teaches this trick to Melek, who accepts it with joy and tries it out herself.
At a later point in the film, Simone and her cameraman arrive at her hotel, there are many unanswered questions, and while the cameraman is putting together another setting for an interview, the doorbell suddenly rings. In complete excitement Leyla stands in the doorway, she presses an envelope into the hand of the two, in which a cell phone is, then she disappears again. What the two then get to see horrifies them. They quickly make backups of the footage, the cameraman frantically packs up his equipment and immediately leaves the hotel room while Simone decides to film the cell phone again with a camera. Then the doorbell rings again, but it’s not the cameraman.
From now on, the film goes on in different parts and shows all the experienced from very different perspectives of each involved person and of course shows some more details and backgrounds. It slowly adds up to a mysterious puzzle and you become more and more involved in the respective partly dark events.
Conclusion:
It can be summed up quite simply, I am positively surprised about the film. Even if the idea with the different angles on the events is not new, there would be, for example, 8 angles of Pete Travis or Déjà Vu of Tony Scott, this film can build with its variant also a very special tension. I especially liked the story about the missing son and the tales of the old woman who continues to prepare the soup, always in the hope that he will return and also the somewhat mystical but also evil touch that was initiated with the appearance of Melek.
Darsteller:
Katja Bürkle (Simone)
Ahmet Varlı (Zafer)
Çağla Yurga (Melek)
Aybi Era (Leyla)
Maximilian Hemmersdorfer (Christian)
Nihan Okutucu (Sibel)
Tudan Ürper (Hatice)
Mutallip Müjdeci (Hasan)
Rıza Akın (Burhan)
Aziz Çapkurt (Eyüp)
Regie:
Ayşe Polat
Weitere Infos zum Film:
https://www.berlinale.de/en/2023/programme/202304749.html
Trailer:
