London’s East End Film Festival has unveiled the winners from its 17th edition, with Turkish drama Daha taking home best film.
The directorial debut of Turkish actor Onur Saylak (The Blue Wave), Daha follows an unhappy teenager in a coastal Turkish town whose life is corrupted by his father’s people-trafficking business. It is an adaptation of a novel by Hakan Günday.
The award was given by a jury comprised of radio and TV host Edith Bowman, producer Dominic Buchanan, actress Ophelia Lovibond, and screenwriter and critic Kate MuirBowman said of the winner, “Such a raw story – really stayed with me. Great performances and incredible first outing for Onur Saylak.”
The other jurors added that the film was “terrific”, “gripping” and “emotionally devastating”.
Variety Review
Karlovy Vary Review: ‘More’
A young man is corrupted by his father's human trafficking business in Turkish actor Onur Saylak's gripping, grueling directorial debut.
By Jessica Kiang
With: Hayat Van Eck, Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan, Turgut Tunçalp, Tankut Yıldız, Tuba Büyüküstün (Turkish, Arabic dialogue)
The blue Aegean sparkles under blazingly sunny skies. The view from a promontory is of rocky cliffs rising from a curving, fertile, beach-fringed bay, and of a series of crags jutting up out of the water like stepping stones to a hopeful horizon. It’s a picture that’s nobody’s idea of Hell, but all Hell needs is a devil in residence, and this strip of the Turkish coast has one, plus another in waiting. Popular Turkish actor Onur Saylak makes an audacious, provocative directorial debut with his adaptation of Hakan Günday’s novel, a film that impresses for its craftsmanship and performances almost as much as it depresses with its relentless, uncompromising depiction of humanity’s basest depravities. Presenting the refugee emergency from a viewpoint rarely explored — that of the traffickers who exploit it for monetary gain — “More” adds a dimension of horror to the humanitarian catastrophe, and convincingly suggests it’s a crisis that corrupts everyone and everything it touches.
Gaza (Hayat Van Eck) is a bright young man who has never left the small Turkish seaside town of his birth — and why would he, given that, as he intones in one of the film’s confessional voiceovers, he is “the son of the most important man alive.” His father, Ahad (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan), hardly looks the part: balding, boorish, jowly and rotund. But Ahad’s real business is not the fruit and vegetable delivery service indicated on his van; it’s the lucrative job of collecting and hiding batches of 20 or 30 people at a time as they flee, mostly from Syria, before some equally unscrupulous boatsmen smuggle them away again across that treacherously calm-looking azure sea.
Ahad has a cellar built specially for this purpose and it’s Gaza’s job to maintain it, to provide the refugees with the basic necessities of food and water while Ahad feels little compunction in exercising his Godlike powers over them, extorting further cash bribes from the men and raping the women or pimping them out to local bigwigs. And so this is a pivotal moment for Gaza, who has a decision to make about who he is, with his own innocence and decency little more than a guttering candle in the darkness of his vicious and venal father’s example. The already grim proceedings take an even grimmer turn following the death of a little boy and the subsequent murder of his mother, and the point of no return arrives quickly.
Saylak has cast his film with care, and gets exceptionally committed performances from Taylan and, in particular, from Van Eck. The sullen Gaza seems to almost physically change over the course of the film, from baby-faced boyishness to a sunken brutishness, his eyes set deep beneath a heavy forehead. In certain light, he can look positively demonic — indeed Feza Çaldiran’s stark, rich photography makes painterly use of directional light throughout, with slices of illumination slanting through otherwise inky frames. Even the sun-drenched exteriors start to feel claustrophobic as the promise of that far-off horizon turns into a taunt.
By contrast, a few of the more literary conceits don’t quite work in translation from page to screen, such as the odd occasional inter-title counting down of days, or the sporadic voiceover that ultimately acts as a red herring concerning the film’s intentions for Gaza. And there’s a sense that in following the novel all the way down to its most hellish extreme and lingering there, the film might actually somewhat dull the message: Its villains become so devoid of humanity they’re somehow easier to dismiss as monsters. Less might have benefited “More,” which is already a difficult, despairing watch, but the ferocity of its intent is both justified and admirable.
It’s ironic that the term for moving undocumented refugees is known as “human trafficking” when its inevitable effect is the dehumanization of its victims. And the central theme of “More” is how that process happens in parallel: the less Gaza sees these people as people, the less of a person he becomes. From there it’s no big leap to understand the film’s most sobering message — one that sits sickly in the pit of your stomach for some time after the movie ends: The lost souls searching for a better life over that duplicitous horizon are far from the only souls lost to this crisis.
Karlovy Vary Review: 'More'
Reviewed at Karlovy Vary Film Festival (competing), July 3, 2017. Running time: 117 MIN. (Original Title: "Daha")
PRODUCTION: (Turkey) An Ay Yapim production, in co-production with b.i.t arts. (International sales: Heretic Outreach, Athens.) Producers: Kerem Çatay. Executive Producer: Yamac Okur.
CREW: Director: Onur Saylak. Screenplay: Saylak, Hakan Günday, Doğu Yaşar Akal, based on the novel "Daha" by Hakan Günday. Camera (color): Feza Çaldiran. Editor: All Aga. Music: Uygur Yigit.
WITH: Hayat Van Eck, Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan, Turgut Tunçalp, Tankut Yıldız, Tuba Büyüküstün (Turkish, Arabic dialogue)
An impressively controlled and complex debut. TWITTER
Turkish actor Onur Saylak ('Autumn') casts young Hayat Van Eck opposite veteran Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan ('Once Upon a Time in Anatolia') in his impressive directorial debut.
A film about a 14-year-old boy helping out his father at work in a rural outpost on the sea would probably feature gorgeous landscapes but wouldn’t necessarily make for an interesting story. But Gaza, the protagonist of the hard-hitting Turkish drama More (Daha), isn’t just any teen, and his father, involved in smuggling people from the war-torn Middle East into nearby Greece, doesn’t just have any old job. Turkish actor Onur Saylak (Autumn) makes an auspicious debut as a director here, turning Hakan Gunday’s ink-black novel of despair into a film that’s a hard sit but that suggests an awful lot — awful being the operative word — about the world we live in today.
After its world premiere in competition at the recent Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, this should travel far and wide and drum up significant interest for whatever Saylak decides to do next as a director.
Ahad (Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan) is a heavy-set man with an equally heavy brow who exploits opportunities wherever he sees them and who expects unquestioned loyalty from the handful of people he works with, including his most loyal aid, Gaza (Hayat Van Eck), his teenage boy. The adolescent, with vivid and alert eyes and a can-do attitude that is probably more rooted in his relative innocence than in his character, is curious about the world and a good student. He’s been secretly testing for a good school in faraway Istanbul, though Dad isn’t very interested in his academic results, telling him to “f— school,” and that’s hardly the first sign he’s not an ideal parent.
Ahad — which, when read backwards, spells Daha, the film’s Turkish title — owns a small truck that he nominally transports fruit and vegetables with along the coast. But the vehicle is also used to take especially Syrian refugees from a nearby marsh to the large but dark basement underneath Ahad’s garage and from there, when the weather allows it, onto a boat that will take them to nearby Greece. Refugees generally seem to stay a couple of days in transit in the underground store room, during which Gaza is charged with making them food and distributing water bottles.
The task isn’t an easy one, but initially Gaza seems to tackle it like any complex challenge at school. There are cultural and language barriers — Syrians don’t speak Turkish and Turks don’t speak Arabic — but the boy manages to do a good job and even tries to improve the refugees’ living standards somewhat by reorganizing the cellar. Whether to show his appreciation or to try and convince him to stay at home rather than leave him behind and move to the big city, Ahad allows Gaza to smoke and drink and feel like he’s an adult. He even offers him to become a partner, rather than an apprentice, in his booming refugee business.
Neither of the men is a big talker, so Saylak, who co-penned the adaptation with Dogu Yasar Akal and Gunday, has to use other means to communicate what the men are thinking and how their characters are evolving. One of the main conduits of information is their physical reaction to some extreme occurrences, starting with one of the film’s most intense sequences, in which Dad drags a female refugee from the basement into their home one night to rape her. This has happened before and is amply foreshadowed, so it is not much of a surprise when it occurs. What does surprise is the way in which Saylak stages the rape, suggesting its extremely violent impact on both the poor refugee and the perpetrator’s son while keeping the actual rape entirely offscreen.
As the woman tries to escape the horror, Ahad finally manages to catch her and he brutalizes her in the corridor while director of photography Feza Caldiran stays in Gaza’s tiny bedroom. As if to literally block out what’s happening, the upset teen has closed his bedroom door and has sat down against it, with first the woman banging on the door for help and then a horrific pounding heard as Ahad has his way with her right behind the door. Gaza, who is the only one in the frame, can’t help but put his hands over his ears, a gesture that at once suggests how aggressive the assault is — the soundwork is appropriately terrifying — but which simultaneously reduces Gaza to something of a child, as he knows what’s happening but won’t do anything about it but pretend he can’t hear it.
There are more scenes that rely on other things than dialogue for their very visceral impact, though Saylak doesn’t always know how to exploit them for maximum impact. A rap song that Gaza has heard from some local boys, for example, seems to toughen his resolve and at one point serves as a way to prep him for a possible confrontation with his father. But the sequence — one of many that showcase the impressive and raw talents of Van Eyck — is all setup and no payoff, as Gaza, chanting the song’s chorus and mock-fighting, works up the courage to see eye-to-eye with his brute of a father. Ahad then arrives to confront his son, but Saylak suddenly skips ahead to the next, seemingly unrelated scene.
There are a few other small missteps like this, as well as some elements that are unnecessary. They include a sporadic voiceover from the older (but never seen) Gaza that reeks of literary pretension and actually distances the viewer more from the 14-year-old’s point-of-view rather than bringing him closer and a couple of very specific time-jumps — “78 days more” — that not only sound awkward in English (perhaps the nod to the title makes more sense in Turkish?) but don’t really add anything. Even so (spoiler ahead), More remains a tautly structured, carefully crescendoing story of a young boy full of promise whose potential and innate goodness are slowly being ground to a pulp by those around him who, and this is the real tragedy, in turn once probably were bright young things themselves. The bitter irony of becoming a heartless human while handling refugees that are escaping worse situations on their way to what they hope will be a better life makes More not only hard to watch but also announces Saylak as a very gifted storyteller who can handle complex material with impressive directorial confidence.
For the record, the film received no state funding from Turkey and was made only with private backing.
Production companies: Ay Yapim, Bit Arts
Cast: Hayat Van Eck, Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan, Turgut Tuncalp, Tankut Yildiz, Tuba Buyukustun
Director: Onur Saylak
Screenplay: Hakan Gunday, Onur Saylak, Dogu Yasar Akal, based on the novel by Hakan Gunday
Producer: Kerem Catay
Director of photography: Feza Caldiran
Production designers: Dilek Ayaztuna, Aykut Ayaztuna
Editor: Ali Aga
Music: Uygur Yigit
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Sales: Heretic Outreach
In Turkish, Arabic
115 minutes
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