Meteorlar | Meteors by Gürcan Keltek

Turkish documentarist Gürcan Keltek makes a political statement with his observation of one of the largest militant actions to take place against the citizens of his own country. Working in documentary format, Turkish filmmaker, Gürcan Keltek has participated in multiple film festivals with his shorts but is better known for Colony (2015), awarded the Best Newcomer Prize at DokuFest in Kosovo. Meteors, his first feature-length film, is commentary that blends together elements of documentary, experimentalism and fiction and takes place in the Kurdish regions of Eastern Anatolia. 



Mavi Boncuk | 

Meteorlar  (Meteors)
Netherlands, Turkey  ·  2017  ·  DCP  ·  Black and White  ·  84'  ·  o.v. Kurdish/Turkish

Director Gürcan Keltek
Cast Ebru Ojen
Producer Gürcan Keltek, Marc Van Goethem, Arda Çiltepe, Burak Çevik
Cinematography Mustafa Şen, Fırat Gürgen
Screenplay adapted by Gürcan Keltek
Editing Fazilet Onat
Production 29P Films
Coproduction 29P Films PV: ardaciltepe@gmail.com
29P Films PV | cevikburak@gmail.com
World Sales | Heretic Outreach: info@heretic.gr

Meteors is a Dutch-Turkish co-production by Marc Van Goethem (29P Films), Gürcan Keltek, Arda Çiltepe, Burak Çevik and is sold internationally by the Greek company Heretic Outreach.

They come at night and everybody steps out. They light torches and remember those who have walked these streets before them. In the coming hours, the city wil be on lockdown: an eclipse appears and meteors start to fall.

Review

After a period of ceasefire and two and a half years of negotiations, the third phase of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict broke out late in the summer of 2015 with the cause put down to the murder of a soldier by alleged members of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK). Turkey immediately declared the largest military operation in history to take place in the region, against the PKK, initiating a nationwide crackdown on possible targets related to the Kurdish autonomists aimed principally at cities in South-Eastern Turkey. There was no media coverage of these operations and no official reports. The only source of information came from the live streams of almost static videos uploaded anonymously by locals living in the cities under militant curfew. In Meteors, clashes and riots continue for a couple of months, but everything is set to change when a meteor shower targets the same region. A divine intervention, or just a natural coincidence?

Keltek was entirely inspired by the footage he happened upon and thus watched during the operations in Eastern Anatolia. Most importantly, he intended to capture and preserve the valuable material he was watching. Meteors is divided into six chapters, with each chapter dealing with a different period of conflict. The story begins with the hunters and invaders who arrive secretly in the middle of the night and ends in total disintegration and meteors. Using footage that is fragmented but incredibly unique and original, the director observes a country that is on the verge of civil war. Focusing mainly on the natural sounds of clashes, riots, firearms and even nature itself, the monochromatic granulated image expands all elements of the drama. However, this film is not solely based on montages of archived footage, as the director uses both original content and the actress-cum-writer Ebru Ojen, who narrates extracts from her book The Vaccine and conducts one-on-one interviews with people who were affected by and lived through the curfew.

There are moments in the film in which reality is distorted and surpassed by events that could only belong to fiction. This is what films such as Meteors hope to emphasise. As there was no official record of the operations conducted, due to a persecution against any attempts made by journalists, the content of this film could easily belong to any common fantasy film. The elements of war are only presented as phone pictures, and witness testimonies sound like stories from the past. Keltek hopes to preserve and integrate the memories of so many before they are forgotten, a clear political statement. He further observes the absurdity of such an imposed permanence as nature, acting as deus ex machina, accentuates the futility of controlling people or regions. Meteors goes beyond the boundaries of the documentary genre, intensifying the political commentary and concluding with a philosophical and almost supernatural questioning of existence judged by “the eyes and ears of forgotten gods”. An unconventional but quite impactful process by a director that seems ready to push boundaries even further.


Gürcan Keltek

Born in İzmir, Turkey, in 1973, Gürcan Keltek studied film at Dokuz Eylül University before directing several shorts including Overtime (2012), selected at Visions Du Réel and DOK Leipzig. His medium-format film, Colony (2015), was screened at FIDMarseille. Meteorlar (2017) is his first feature film.
2015 Colony
2012 Overtime





Interview
Cineuropa: Is Meteors a purely political film, and how difficult was it to create?
Gürcan Keltek: It’s always difficult, especially when everyone has a different take on what has happened and you must reconsider everything while the events are still unfolding. Meteors was a reaction to what was going on, and there was a certain urgency to it, something that helped me to finish it. As a filmmaker, my intention is to go beyond current political situations. There were places I wanted to explore, where I don’t belong and which I want to observe differently. So it’s true that the film has political dimensions, but it starts to build itself up from something very personal, and then it becomes something else. I was originally fascinated by the history, the region, the people and the beautiful creatures in it, and Meteors is about them. The most difficult thing was to keep all of these elements intact while everything was fundamentally shifting or literally disappearing.

Why did you divide the storyline into chapters?
The fragmented structure of the separate narratives led me to divide the story into numbered chapters. I edited a series of sequences with my editor, Fazilet Onat, and we tried to make them speak to one another. There were geographical time jumps and different events happening simultaneously, so they were necessary for the narrative, which was sometimes intentionally sloppy. I like chapters; I pay attention when they appear on screen. I was doing some research on old pagan texts and anonymous Kurdish folk songs while making the film, so all I was seeing was chapters. 

How did you manage to preserve the found footage?
I collected found material from many sources: from Russian news channels that captured the meteorites to independent reporters and CCTV footage. The most important footage came from Güliz Sağlam, a great filmmaker from Istanbul. What she shot for the Women’s Initiative for Peace in the south-east of Turkey was amazing, and we also used other recordings from them. When we felt that there was a gap to fill, we also went to the spot itself to do our own shooting. Apart from our handful of scenes, we preserved and edited everything else at once. 

Is this an experimental film or a documentary?
Initially, I was joking that Meteors would be a documentary with psychedelic undertones, but now it looks more like a fiction to me, as there is written dialogue and a rough timeline or script. Even if everything shown is real, the idea of natural or supernatural forces intervening while some huge political turmoil is going on is completely fictional. There are no limits in documentary filmmaking, and when you try to describe them, it just expands. There were some images that still haunt me, so I never thought of particular criteria. I believe that experimental fiction and documentary co-exist. 

Why did you use grainy, monochromatic cinematography?
I shot the opening scene at Mount Nemrut in grainy black and white many years ago; I used celluloid, and I really like the texture, which paired well with the low-quality videos with high-resolution grains. This is also directly linked to the elements of the film. At that time, there was such scarce information and limited news coverage on south-eastern cities. I believe the visual style resonates with our distorted collective memory, like one of those anonymous, web-streamed videos from the region, with glitches, monologues and the like. I was fascinated by those images. What happened back then is a faded memory now, and Meteors is my re-imagining of how we remember everything.

What was your experience of co-producing Meteors?
It started off as a self-financed film, and for a long time, I was alone with very few people. We won a work-in-progress award at Meetings on the Bridge at the International Istanbul Film Festival, which was a great help. Afterwards, with 29P Films and Marc Van Goethem, we managed to wrap the post-production. Then, two brilliant filmmaker friends of mine, Burak Çevik and Arda Çiltepe, joined me as producers, and we literally finished everything together – with a very tiny budget, of course. There is no conventional way to finance a film like this in Turkey right now.