Wednesday, April 11

Between life and death: Halef

Halef from the section “National Competition” was screened at Atlas Sineması with the participation of the director Murat Düzgünoğlu and the film crew. Düzgünoğlu shared that he wrote the script together with Melik Saraçoğlu, and explained: “I was going through a difficult and distressful period of my life. So, I wanted to write about my personal experience. I put together a few stories and told Melik about it. We established a framework for the story but after a while that framework was unable to sustain the story. We’ve created many different versions of the screenplay.” Saraçoğlu said that co-writing a screenplay together is a highly creative process: “Writing by yourself can be very challenging sometimes, but when you write with someone conflicting ideas help you improve and you begin to see the problems you weren’t able to see by yourself because you were too immersed into it. Murat and I followed a disciplined workpath. We didn’t argue much but mostly came to an agreement.” Düzgünoğlu also shared that Halef is a real person, that he knows him for nearly 20 years: “There are some important questions for human beings: God, death, the fear of death, the unbearableness of life, the desire to believe in an afterlife… We tried to convey these ideas from a completely different aspect, though reincarnation. What resources do we need to maintain this life? How does the question of death become bearable?”

Photo: Benek Özmez