18/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Aslı Özge returns to docu-fiction and her native city of Istanbul, creating an engaging, personal story with a strong political and social aspect

Turkish-German director Aslı Özge returns to the Berlinale's Panorama for the third time with Faruk [+see also:
interview: Asli Özge
film profile], arguably her most engaging film to date. Shot over a period of seven years, it is a personal, playful docu-fiction hybrid set against Istanbul's urban and economic backdrop, bringing to mind her first film, Men on the Bridge [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Asli Özge
film profile].

At first, Özge sets it up as the making of a film, with her father, 90-year-old Faruk, as the main protagonist. In the first shot, she is off-screen, instructing him on how to pose in front of a mirror, naked from the waist up. His likeability is established through this exchange, the whimsical orchestral score and his vulnerable position. The seeds of what we will recognise as their relationship are sown.

The opening credits see the film crew preparing for a shoot, and as Özge or other members appear in the shot, their names and functions appear on the screen. Throughout the first half of the feature, the director keeps breaking the fourth wall, with repeated takes, clapperboards, cameras and booms kept in the cut. This approach is fun and provides a distancing effect, always reminding us that this is a film and not necessarily an objective reality, and at the same time bringing us closer to the protagonist. We feel that Faruk is not exactly clear on what his daughter is doing, but he is there for her. And he is certainly invested in the plot, which deals with his own living situation.

Started long before the catastrophic 2023 earthquake (the fact that the film is premiering about one year after it lends it a symbolic gravity), the government's Urban Transformation programme aims to replace old, unsafe buildings with new ones, and Faruk’s own is among them – except his building is not really unsafe, and he is against it. However, most of his neighbours want to use this chance to get their promised luxury flats.

The process entails deciding on offers from more or less corrupt contractors and going through some complicated red tape, such as the need for Faruk to repeatedly take mental-fitness tests owing to his age. He is advised to give power of attorney to a neighbour or his daughter, but he is in fact in very good shape, and there is an element of pride preventing him from doing so. Some welcome, absurdist humour finds its way into these scenes.

The tenants of the building are a close-knit community: when an elderly person goes missing, four of them, including Faruk, go to the police. Soon, the man is found dead on the metro; he had been riding all day without anyone noticing. In the following scene, Faruk is standing on a busy street, and the camera zooming out, accompanied by a menacing sound design, implies that he – or, rather, his daughter – might be wondering if the same thing could happen to him.

In this cinematic approach, Faruk is both the director's father and an old man in Turkish society, while Asli is both the filmmaker and the immigrant daughter of a Turkish man. Halfway through, she mostly departs the scene and abandons the initial, distancing method, allowing the audience to get increasingly immersed in his complex emotional story. Here is where the documentary-fiction blurring brings a particular strength to proceedings. The film's plot and its "realness" are less important than the protagonist’s own feeling of reality and how much it depends on the people he shares it with. And when the film is based on a real event, re-creating it gives the person who went through it another perspective, and the audience gets an experience that feels true, and in this case, emotional and engaging.

Faruk is a co-production between Germany's EEE Film and The Post Republic, Turkey's FC Istanbul, and France's Parallel 45. Heretic has the international rights.