Turkey’s Oscar© 2023 Entry for Best International Feature: ‘Kerr’ directed by Tayfun Pirselimglu;Tayfun Pirselimglu
An interview with the film’s director sheds some light on one of the strangest, most surreal of films. Michael Gondry meets Kafka with a particularly Turkish twist, this story centers around a simple man who is trapped in a town when he goes to his father’s funeral. Everyone seems to have met and spoken to him there, but he seems not to know anyone or to remember them. In fact, he never understands anything, nor does he ask what’s going on until it is too late.
“Everything is bizarre here. Even the weather is strange,” says one of his father’s friends.
Gradually he begins to ask questions and yet he never understands what is happening. He is told he is asking the wrong questions. None of his questions is ever answered. But questions are always asked of him, for which he has no answers either. One of the most frequent questions asked of him is, “What do you think of the state of the country?” Endlessly asked and never addressed, it seems to me to be the main point of the movie.
It all begins at the train station where Kerr is waiting for the train to take him back to his hometown where, now divorced, he lives alone and runs his own little printing shop. While at the train station, he becomes the sole witness to a murder. The murderer leaves the scene calmly, strangely showing no interest in his presence. When the police will not let him leave town, he goes to his father’s home where the woman who kept house and nursed his father introduces herself. He later sees her with the murderer and he runs away in fear when the man sees him and follows him. At the same time, a quarantine is declared due to roaming rabid dogs. The whole town turns into an existential purgatory with no exit.
View the TRAILER here.
Writer, director, author and visual artist Tayfun Pirselimglu is one of the most idiosyncratic Turkish auteurs working today. Best known for his unusual phantasm, distinctive philosophical approach and themes of eternal recurrence, his allegorical plots are also politically dense.
“Entering the unique worlds he creates is like plunging into a Kafkaesque labyrinth with echoes of classical film noirs.” (MUBI)
You may recall Michel Godry and Charlie Kaufman’s collaboration on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a couple undergoes a medical procedure to have each other erased from their memories forever, or their earlier film Human Nature in which a woman is in love with a man in love with another woman, and all three have designs on a young man raised as an ape. Similarly, Pirselimglu criticizes social and ethical problems in a deeply humorous way with characters dragged by absurdity.
Could this be how Turkey is today? A country cut off with curfews, quarantined, and ruled by a falsely elected dictator where crimes are forgotten while those who witness them are arrested or living in fear of being arrested. (Today’s news announced the arrest of the Mayor of Istanbul for calling a public official a fool, in the context of calling out the name that official called him.) It is a very strange country indeed. Only beautiful music redeems it and then, only in part, from incessant repetitive warnings to citizens to stay indoors.
We are all somewhat like Kerr in an environment where there seems to be some who comprehend it. We cannot but feel we have entered a strange and alien environment which we can either adjust to or leave for …something worse? It is not at all a neat package though it seems as if it could be if only we had a clue as to what was going on. The questions not asked, the questions not answered; nothing gives us a clue until it is too late and we face only a bigger abyss when we try to get answers or try to escape.
What inspired you to make this film?
To me it seemed very subversive.
Prevailing absurdity. Logic is evaporating and insanity is coming into power. We’re stuck in a world on the edge of madness and people are living happily in this abnormality. This is making me scared and I’m asking the question as the one in the film is asking ‘What’s happening really?’ among society living in such established craziness.
How did you get away making it in Turkey and not getting exiled for it?
Instead at Antalya you won the top awards. Is Antalya so independent of Erdoğan?
The plot is universal and it is pointing to the anomaly of humanity’s and society’s current state of insanity. This absurdity happens everywhere including in the USA where the Capitol was raided. The whole world is in this foolishness and I’m conveying the story of a common madness.
Kerr has been awarded in various festivals in Turkey and abroad by the way.
How did you find your actors? Erdem Senocak seems made for the part.
Yes, indeed, he amazingly built a character that completely fits the one in the script. Erdem Şenocak is a very talented actor and this is his first leading role. Some of the actors in the film are ones that had sunk into oblivion and I’m very glad to reintroduce them. The casting period did not take too long as I visualized the faces of the characters during the script writing and consequently settled on them. There were no auditions but instead long conversations.
Do you have back stories on this character? Is it more explained in the novel you wrote that you based this film upon?
Novels offer the readers and the writers the opportunity to shoot films in their minds, through their imagination. Words are the tools to create a universe. Films are compulsive, on the other hand. The mind of the audience is implemented by the formerly made vision. I dare to challenge my own book from this aspect. Regarding the character, yes, I almost always follow the same person lost in absurdity in my books. The reader does not have any previous information on him but gradually the background is revealed through his reactions in the plot.
What did you leave out that was in the novel?
The script is not completely and exactly based on the novel, meaning, I left some characters out and I put some other elements in from my other stories.
Did you add anything?
A couple of new figures. Alligators are replaced by the dogs, by the way!
How was it adapting your own novel to film?
I have not attempted to adapt any of my books before. I write my own scripts and this one was different from my previous experience. I think I wanted to expose my own film shot in my mind while writing the novel. This is a challenge between the writer and the director who are normally rivals. Anyway, it was not a schizoid process, but compelling.
What happens to you in the process of writing and directing?
Writing is an isolated act. Film making is a collective process and the director is encircled by the problems of others beside his/her own ones. Ironically, writing is the healing period of my wounds received in film making.
What happens to you now that the film is shot?
Nothing happens any different than with previous ones. Same problems, same solutions, same wounds, same healing.
What do you consider your strongest attribute as a director?
Clever directors never answer this question.
Where do you feel least assured?
Time pressure on the set during the shooting is not a desirable situation.
What do you like most about directing?
Creating a universe with pictures is eternal.
How did you find being in LA? Have you been there before?
I’ve never been LA before. I visited the east coast various times but I did not have the chance to visit the west before. LA is the Olympus of the cinema and to be there is an interesting experience in this sense, as a director.
Did you learn anything about international sales and US distribution?
My producer Ms. Ersen is dealing with this subject.
Kerr received its world premiere in Competition at the Warsaw Film Festival in 2021 and won the Best Director and Best Music Awards at Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival 2021 and Best Director and Best Art Director Awards at the Istanbul Film Festival in 202.
Directed and written by Tayfun Pirselimoglu http://www.tayfunpirselimoglu.com/default.asp
Tayfun Pirselimoglu graduated from Middle East Technical University after which he went to Vienna and studied painting at Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst (Academy of Applied Arts) He held various exhibitions in different cities of the world, including Vienna, Istanbul, Ankara, Budapest, Tallinn, etc. He is one of the founders of the independent art initiative of Akademie Genius which he lectured on scriptwriting, cinema, and painting. He also conducted workshops on film making in Wien, Athens, Ankara, etc.
Pirselimoglu wrote six novels (Tales from the Desert, Album of the Missing Persons, Melancholia, Towers of the City, Kerr and the Barber) and three storybooks (Rooms of the Hotels, The Newest Lives of Harry Lime and Other Side of the Desert).
He started his film career as a scriptwriter and wrote various scripts of shorts and features. He directed his first short film Dayim (My Uncle) in 1999 and then Il Silenzio e d’Oro (Silent is Golden) in 2002; both have received numerous international awards. In 2002 he also shot Hiçbiryerde (In Nowhereland), his first feature film supported by Eurimages which has also received many awards. He shot the trilogy of ‘conscience and death’ including Riza (Riza) 2007 premiered in Berlinale Forum, Pus (Haze) 2009 premiered as well in Berlinale Forum, and Saç (Hair) 2010 premiered in Locarno FF, all awarded. Sideway (2017) premiered in Warsaw and has received six awards from many festivals. The shooting of his last feature film, adapted from his book named Kerr, was completed in 2020. Pirselimoglu currently has a film retrospective streaming on MUBI, Turkey.
Cast: Erdem Şenocak, Jale Arıkan, Rıza Akın
Produced by: Vildan Ersen, Gataki Films
Running time: 101 mins
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