Touring Program - Zeki Demirkubuz Retrospective

October 1 - May 31, 2008

For close to a decade now, a generation of Turkish auteur filmmakers has been cultivating an increasing audience of admirers and followers, both homegrown and across the world. Their cinema is distinctly original while deeply conversant with master-filmmakers as diverse as Bresson, Bergman and Kiarostami, not claiming lineage from any school or filmmaker per se. The constellation of names that have acquired renown includes Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Zeki Demirkubuz, Reha Erdem, Dervis Zaim and Yesim Ustaoglu. Their films are almost invariably produced in Turkey by independent Turkish production outfits, which they have set up themselves. Coupled with their prolific filmographies, this fact attests to a significant turn in contemporary Turkish cinema, one that runs against the current direction of film production in the region (Eastern Europe, the Arab world and Iran), where co-productions with western European funds have often allowed the possibility for auteur, individualistic, and experimental filmmaking to challenge the dominion of commercial productions.

Amongst this group of filmmakers, Zeki Demirkubuz has been the most prolific. Kader (Destiny), his seventh feature-length fiction, premiered in September of 2006 at the Antalya Film Festival in Turkey. His filmography is versatile; he has written and directed intimiste films such as Waiting Room (Bekleme Odasi, 2004) and big productions like Innocence (Masumiyet, 1997), yet there are salient themes and motifs that permeate his body of work—the most striking of which being the literary power of his scripts, often inspired from masterpieces of modern fiction.

Background

Born in 1964 in Isparta, Zeki Demirkubuz graduated from the Istanbul University Department of Communications. He was imprisoned for three years at the age of 17 for alleged communist activities. Upon his release, he became involved with filmmaking –more by accident than design, he claims– and began his career as an assistant to famed Turkish director Zeki Okten. He recalls, “I was imprisoned between the ages of 17 and 21. I'm a pure unbeliever now, but I'm not an atheist: I believe in doubt, and it's that feeling that makes it impossible for me to be a communist, or a follower of any other ideology. When I was in prison I read Crime and Punishment for the first time, and it really helped me understand what I had lived through. I felt [my time in prison] was going to lead into something. I thought I would become a writer, but I became a filmmaker.”*

Demirkubuz established his own production company, Mavi Film, deliberately located outside Istanbul’s mainstream Yesilcam Studios (Turkey’s homegrown Hollywood). Although he initially perceived ‘independent’ cinema as free from the financial constraints typically attached to mainstream studios, Demirkubuz revisited the notion well into his career: “What is important is to be able to produce something from one’s core, inner world.”

He wrote and directed his first feature-length fiction, Block C (C Blok) in 1994. Uncompromising and fiercely independent, Demirkubuz is known to control almost every aspect of his films, making few concessions to prevailing trends. His affinity for literature has become one of the hallmarks of his identity as a filmmaker; the screenplays he conceives and writes often feel like novels, the characters given long dialogues or monologues. “In the beginning,” he says, “I was trying to write the script by putting the story at the forefront. As time passed, I became more interested in making movies about a situation and not minding that the story is pushed to the background.”

He first gained the notice of film critics and international audiences with his second feature film, Innocence (Masumiyet), which traveled to numerous festivals in Turkey and Europe. Innocence was followed by the successful reception of Fate (Yazgi, 2001) and The Confession (Itiraf, 2002), both of which were screened at Cannes Film Festival’s ‘Un Certain Regard’. To Demirkubuz, The Confession and Waiting Room (Bekleme Odasi, 2004) exemplify works where he has “taken a human condition or situation out of our lives and written a story around it”; while in Fate—inspired by Albert Camus’ The Stranger—the situation and story are equally foregrounded.

Fate, which, along with Confession and The Waiting Room comprises a trilogy entitled Tales of Darkness, tells the story of a filmmaker who is unable to complete a film adaptation of Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment. Demirkubuz claims to still be eager to actually produce an adaptation of the book: “I haven't been able to come up with a Raskolnikov who would be believable.” The themes visited in the trilogy are in fact pervasive throughout his work; after seven films, he observes, “I realize that I will continue to make films about these subjects.”

Demirkubuz has earned a number of awards, including the FIPRESCI (The International Federation of Film Critics) awards several times as well as the Golden Orange at the Antalya Film Festival in Turkey. He claims to have been influenced by few filmmakers or schools, but recurring patterns of opaque characters wrought in ethical dilemmas have inspired comparisons with Bresson and Kieslowski. In reply, he opined: “My sources have really been life and literature, and my own inner darkness.”

* All quotes from Zeki Demirkubuz have been taken from an interview by Aydın Bal (translated by Zeynep Kılıç), published on the website of the Bosphorus Art Project, and an interview by Jamie Bell, Sight & Sound, February 2006.