Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Original title Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da
Country of production Turkey ,
Bosnia and Herzegovina
original language Turkish
Publishing year 2011
length 157 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan
script Nuri Bilge Ceylan,
Ercan Kesal ,
Ebru Ceylan
production Zeynep Özbatur Atakan
camera Gokhan Tiryaki
cut Nuri Bilge Ceylan,
Bora Göksingöl
occupation

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (original title Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da ) is a film drama by the director and screenwriter Nuri Bilge Ceylan from 2011 .

In the crime film, police officers and a forensic doctor investigate a murder case, search for a missing corpse and ultimately convict the murderer. The film combines elements of a road movie with a precise depiction of the Turkish province and its inhabitants, using the example of a group of 40 to 50-year-old men. Their conversations revolve around the banalities of daily life, such as food recipes, suffering from bureaucracy, work and family, problems in Turkish society, but also touch on existential and ideological issues of people, questions of guilt and atonement and the question of death.

action

In the opening scene you can see three men drinking together in a car repair shop in the evening. One of them goes out to feed a dog. In the course of the film it turns out that this man was the victim of a murder and the other two are the suspects.

In the area around the city of Keskin in Anatolia, a convoy of three vehicles is on the way late in the evening in search of the body of a murdered villager. Under the command of Police Commissioner Naci and Public Prosecutor Nusret, the two suspects are supposed to lead the police, the public prosecutor and a doctor to the place where the body is buried. Kenan, one of the suspects, can no longer remember the exact location. He pretends he was drunk that night. So the convoy is forced to stop at several places. During the journey, the men talk about topics such as food, family life, death, suicide, bureaucracy and their work.

During the night the convoy stops at the village chief in a village . Kenan claims there that he has a child with the murdered man's wife. The next day the troops find the place they are looking for, which a dog has already partially dug up. At the site, the second suspect said tearfully that he was the murderer, but Kenan asks him to be quiet. The corpse is lifted up, its chains untied and taken to a hospital in Kırıkkale for an autopsy . There the police can prevent Kenan from being attacked by some angry citizens. The murder victim's wife stands in front of the hospital with her son. Kenan is hit with a stone in the head by his alleged son.

In the hospital office, the doctor is talking to the public prosecutor Nusret. Nusret had told him about a friend's wife who, during her pregnancy, predicted her death to the exact day. She died for no apparent reason. It turns out in the course of the conversation that she was probably Nusret's wife and had a reason for suicide.

The murdered man's wife identifies the body as her murdered husband. The autopsy that followed reveals that the man was buried alive. The doctor does not include this finding in his report, possibly to save the perpetrator a maximum sentence, perhaps also to spare the relatives the certainty that the victim has suffocated in agony. In the final scene, while the corpse is being cut open, the doctor watches from the window as the mother and her son walk past a schoolyard.

Reviews

In the reviews, Ceylan's work was counted as "world cinema", the director among the greats of auteur cinema, especially Michelangelo Antonioni , Ceylan being a "legitimate successor" of the Italian, whose blow-up associations were "inevitable because of the corpse phantom" . The images in the film were “full of beauty and rigor” and tempted to look. Captivating with a melancholy atmosphere, the film takes a “gentle, floating gait, like pictures in a dream”, moving between the living and the dead as in German romanticism. But he “requires a lot of patience due to the extremely slow narrative” and the audience has to invest in “efforts to understand”. Because the story draws "its viewers into a kind of swamp bog of uncertainties, riddles and doubts" and avoid unequivocal truths. A slight comedy or “digressions into the comic” were noticed.

For Barbara Schweizerhof from epd Film , Anatolia is Ceylan's “most cheerful and accessible film so far”, but also one with more dialogues than ever before. Andreas Kilb wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : “You have to love Ceylan's films for these moments: the moments in which the narrative detaches itself from the occasion and becomes an expedition into a soul landscape that only the greatest in cinema have so far penetrated. “For the taz critic Simon Rothöhler, too , the film consisted of“ educational detours ”that lead to insights. The poetics of the “fabulously deformatted film” do not fit into any scheme, “form rigor and free play of forms” coexist “like it has not for a long time”. For a long time it remains a mystery where the director wants to lead the story, said Rainer Gansera in the Süddeutsche Zeitung . The narrative defies the good-bad logic of common television thrillers, the crime that has taken place remains outside the plot and creates a suction as a blank space. In doing so, Ceylan reverses the hierarchy of attention between central and peripheral things, as it predominates in genre films, and paves the way for "the inside of sensations."

Cinema Captivating atmosphere; requires a lot of patience because the story is told extremely slowly; Cross thumb.
epd film Ceylan's most cheerful and accessible film to date; 4 out of 5 stars.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Z. World cinema; Moments that you have to love, that only the greatest in cinema can master.
Frankfurter Rundschau Richly reward the audience for the pace of the story; visually good, masterful light; Moments of humor.
Southgerman newspaper A great one in auteur cinema; original dramaturgical construction; Settings full of beauty.
The daily mirror Intensive.
the daily newspaper Fabulously renounce genre conventions; unsematic poetics; Rigid and free of form at the same time.
The world Image spaces tempting to look; wonderful scenes; soft comedy; stunning Erdogan.

Awards

In 2016, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia ranked 54th in a BBC survey of the 100 most important films of the 21st century .

medium

  • Once upon a time in Anatolia / Once Upon a Time in Anatolia / Il était une fois en Anatolie. DVD from Trigon-Film

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Once Upon a Time in Anatolia in the Lexicon of International FilmsTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used . Retrieved February 4, 2013
  2. ↑ a b c d Andreas Kilb : From the complaint book of a country doctor . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 20, 2012, p. 33
  3. ↑ a b c d Rainer Gansera: Paths inside . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 20, 2012, p. 13
  4. ↑ a b c d e Cosima Lutz: Play us another song about death . In: Die Welt January 21, 2012, p. 26
  5. ↑ a b c Cinema : Once upon a time in Anatolia . Brief review, No. 2/2012, p. 65
  6. ↑ a b c d e Simon Rothöhler: Concentrated on the matter . In: the daily newspaper January 19, 2012, p. 16
  7. ^ A b c Barbara Schweizerhof: Once upon a time in Anatolia . In: epd Film No. 1/2012, p. 44
  8. ↑ Anke Westphal: In search of clarity . In: Frankfurter Rundschau January 20, 2012, p. 31
  9. ↑ Bernd Buder: Once upon a time in Anatolia . Brief review in: Der Tagesspiegel January 19, 2012, p. 6