About Zeki Demirkubuz. Mental Minefields: The Dark Tales of Zeki Demirkubuz
About Zeki Demirkubuz*
For close to a decade now, a generation of Turkish auteur filmmakers has been cultivating an increasing audience of admirers and followers, homegrown and across the world. Their unabashedly individualistic cinema, while deeply conversant with master filmmakers as diverse as Bresson, Bergman and Kiarostami, does not claim lineage from any school or filmmaker.
The constellation of names that have acquired renown includes Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Zeki Demirkubuz, Reha Erdem, Derviş Zaim and Yeşim Ustaoğlu. Their films are most often 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 for auteur and experimental filmmaking to challenge the prevalence of commercial productions.
Amongst this group, Zeki Demirkubuz has been the most prolific. Kader (Destiny, 2006), his seventh feature-length fiction, premiered in September 2006 at the Antalya Film Festival in Turkey. His filmography is versatile in genre, he has written and directed intimiste films such as Bekleme Odası (The Waiting Room, 2003) and big productions such as Masumiyet (Innocence, 1997), yet there are salient themes and motifs that permeate his works, the most striking being the literary sensibility of his plotlines and characters, some of which were directly inspired from masterworks of modern fiction like Crime and Punishment and The Stranger.
Born in 1964 in the Eğirdir province of Isparta, Turkey, 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. On 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 Ökten. 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 Filmcilik Ltd., deliberately located outside Istanbul’s mainstream Yesilçam Studios (Turkey’s homegrown Hollywood). Although he intially perceived ‘independent’ cinema as one unhinged from the material constraints that come attached to big mainstream studios, well into his career, Demirkubuz revisited this opinion and remarks: “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, C Blok (Block-C)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, his screenplays conceived and written by himself have the feel of novels, and characters are 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 garnered the attention of film critics and international audiences with his second feature film, Innocence, which traveled to numerous festivals in Turkey and Europe. Innocence was followed by the successful reception of Yazgı (Fate, 2001) and İtiraf (Confession, 2001), both of which were screened at Cannes Film Festival’s “Un Certain Regard.” Confession and The Waiting Room exemplify to him works where he has “taken a human condition or situation out of our lives and written a story around it,” but with Fate, inspired by Albert Camus’s The Stranger, both situation and story are at the forefront.
With Fate, Demirkubuz inaugurated a trilogy he titled “Tales of Darkness.” The trilogy includes Confession and The Waiting Room, which tells the story of a filmmaker who is unable to complete a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He claims to still be eager to actually produce the book’s adaptation: “I haven’t been able to come up with a Raskolnikov who would be believable.” The themes visited in the trilogy infuse all 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 The International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) 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 themes of opaque characters wrought in ethical dilemmas have inspired comparisons with Bresson and Kieslowski. In reply, he opines: “My sources have really been life and literature, and my own inner darkness.”
Rasha Salti.Mental Minefields: The Dark Tales of Zeki Demirkubuz. Eds. Zeynep Dadak and Enis Kostepen. New York: Altyazı, ArteEast and Moon and Stars Project. 2007.
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.
