The first feature to be written and directed by actor Muzaffer Ozdemir, best known for his
roles in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Small Town, Clouds Of May and Distant (for which he won
the Cannes Best Actor Award) Home (Yurt) is a beautifully composed meditation on
memories and a changing world. Dogan, a pessimistic and neurotic architect, longing for his
homeland, revisits the countryside of his childhood for the first time in many years. His
search for the familiar, however, is an elusive one and in this modern technological age he
quickly discovers that time which once stood still is now fleeting, and that the tranquillity of
familiar landscapes is fading. Poetic and resonant, Home (Yurt) is a serene depiction of one
man’s journey to find his own sense of peace amidst the conflict between nature and the
ever intrusive modern age.

707MB | 1h 15mn | 640×272 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/8FCDF84BD02E213/Yurt_aka_Home.avi

Language(s):Turkish
Subtitles:English Hardcoded

The post Muzaffer Özdemir – Yurt aka Home (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
How is it that the same movie can seem tedious on first viewing and absorbing on the second? Why doesn’t it grow even more tedious? In the case of “Distant,” which I first saw at Cannes in 2003, perhaps it helped that I knew what the story offered and what it did not offer, and was able to see it again without expecting what would not come.

The film takes place in Turkey, but its dynamic could be transplanted anywhere — maybe to our own families. It is about a cousin from the country who comes to the big city searching for work and asks to stay “for a few days” with his relative, who is a divorced photographer with walls filled with books and an apartment filled with sad memories.

Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir) is the photographer, whose wife has divorced him and is marrying another man; the couple will move to Canada. What went wrong is not hard to guess: Mahmut is a man of habit, silent, introspective, exhausted by life. Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) comes from a town where the factory has failed, and there are no jobs; he foolishly thinks he can get hired on one of the ships in the port, but there are no jobs, and an old sailor informs him that the wages are so bad, he’ll never have anything left over to send home.

It is the dead of winter. Yusuf tramps through the snow with no gloves and inadequate shoes, and his job search starts unpromisingly when the first ship he finds is listing and sinking. He haunts the coffee bars of the sailors, who smoke and wait. Mahmut, meanwhile, says goodbye to his wife and then secretly and sadly watches her leaving from the airport. He has a shabby affair with a woman who lives nearby and who will not make eye contact in a restaurant. He watches art videos (Tarkovsky, I think) to drive Yusuf from the room and then switches to porno.

For both men, smoking is a consolation, and they spend a lot of time standing alone, doing nothing, maybe thinking nothing, smoking as if it is a task that provides them with purpose. Mahmut has rules (smoking only in the kitchen or on the balcony), but Yusuf sits in his favorite chair and smokes and drinks beer when Mahmut is away, and Mahmut grows gradually furious at the disorder that has come into his life. “Close the door,” he says as Yusuf goes to the guest bedroom, because he wants to shut him away from his privacy.

A photographic expedition to the countryside, with Yusuf hired as his assistant, turns out badly for Mahmut; sharing rented rooms, they invade each other’s space. Finally, Mahmut has had enough and asks Yusuf, “What are your plans?” But Yusuf has none. He does not even have an opening for plans. He is trapped in unemployment, has no money, no skills, no choices.

The film, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is shot with a frequently motionless camera that regards the men as they, frequently, regard nothing in particular. It permits silences to grow. Perhaps in the hurry of Cannes, with four or five films a day, I could not slow down to occupy those silences, but seeing the film a second time, I understood they were crucial: There is little these men have to say to each other and — more to the point — no one else for them to talk with. Women are a problem for them both. Yusuf shadows attractive women but is too shy to approach them before they inevitably meet a man and walk off arm-in-arm. A man without funds is in a double bind: He has no way to attract good women or to hire bad ones. The one sex scene we witness with Mahmut, which is out of focus at the far end of a room, is so joyless that solitude seems preferable.

A movie like this touches everyday life in a way that we can recognize as if Turkey were Peoria. I can imagine a similar film being made in America, although Americans might talk more. What do you say to a relative who is out of work and seems unlikely to ever work again? He is family, and so there is a sense of responsibility bedded in childhood, but there are no jobs and he has no skills, and your own comfort, which seems so enviable to him, is little consolation to you. To have joyless work means you have employment but not an occupation. At the end, one of the men is sitting on a bench on a gray, cold day, staring at nothing, and if we could see the other man, we could probably see another bench. “Distant” is a good title for this movie.

2.62GB | 1h 49m | 1024×554 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/87664E6CB2B55AE/Nuri_Bilge_Ceylan_-_(2002)_Distant.mkv

Language:Turkish
Subtitles:English

The post Nuri Bilge Ceylan – Uzak AKA Distant (2002) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
This is a movie within movie, which is almost recursive, i.e., the movie inside looks like director Ceylan’s previous movie, Kasaba. It is about the movie director, Muzaffer, going back to his hometown to make a movie using a cast of local people. While Muzaffer is around, his mother complains about simple health problems, his father is in a legal fight against the government for his land, his cousin gets out of his job to help Muzaffer who promises him to find a job in Istanbul, and his little cousin Ali tries to carry an egg in his pocket for 40 days so that he’ll get the watch of his dreams. In the meantime, they get to form the cast for Muzaffer’s movie as well

3.24GB | 1h 57m | 1024×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D89DCC8B32EEE0F/Clouds.of.May.(1999).BluRay.576p.aac.sub-eng-fre.x264-bub.mkv

Language:Turkish
Subtitles:English,French

The post Nuri Bilge Ceylan – Mayis sikintisi AKA Clouds of May (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.