Friday, April 13

Grain from the “National Competition” was screened at Atlas Sineması with the participation of the director Semih Kaplanoğlu. The film follows two men in a near and unclear future and the director talked about the starting point of the film: “I didn’t want to make a science fiction film or create a dystopia but to show the picture of what kind of future is awaiting us if we live our present this way.” Kaplanoğlu answered the question about why he filmed it in English: “I’d first written the screenplay in Turkish. After I while I began to notice something. There’s actually a civilization and a language that created this world that we show in the film. It’s a civilization that stabilizes our relationship with life since the 16th and the 17th century… It’s the culture of capitalism, colonialism and consumerism… Today we use that language in every part of the world, it is the lingua franca everywhere and if I had made this film in Turkish or in any other language, it would have lost its perspective on reality.” As to why he filmed it in black and white Kaplanoğlu said: “One the one hand, shooting in black and white was a practical choice because we began filming in the USA, then in October we moved to Turkey, and finally to Germany. The climates, colors, even the shapes of trees change between these three different geographies. So we had to make the choice of black and white in order to put these all together in one world without showing the differences. The second reason is that the film actually begins with black and then it fades lighter. It didn’t seem quite possible in a color film. There are also some contrasts in the film; there are two worlds, two cities etc. That the film is black and white helped the contrasts as well.”

Photo: Ersin Durmuş