Mental Minefields: The Dark Tales of Zeki Demirkubuz
Introduction
Together with Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Yeşim Ustaoğlu and a handful of others, Zeki Demirkubuz has been leading a revolution in Turkish cinema for the past decade. Born in Isparta in 1964, Demirkubuz was politically engaged at an early age, even spending a term in jail during the end of his teenage years. After studies at Istanbul University, he came to the cinema as an assistant to director Zeki Ökten, whom he has often credited as his mentor.
Demirkubuz established a strong, personal style right from his debut feature, C Blok (Block-C, 1994). A powerful exploration of a woman whose marriage is falling apart, the film moves freely between the perceptual world and the world of the woman’s fears and desires. The cool, modern look of the apartment complex where the film is set makes an effective counterpoint to the emotions raging beneath his character’s seemingly placid surface.
Traditionally, film critics have made a sharp distinction between a cinema of cold, hard reality versus a cinema of an interior, mental world inflected by fantasy and invention— Lumière and Méliès as the dual, perpetually warring fathers of the medium. Demirkubuz is one of the contemporary filmmakers who most makes a lie of that hollow distinction. In all his films his protagonists seem to move from their daily lives to worlds of their inner lives, yet one never feels in Demirkubuz’s films that the alternate world is any less real to his characters. His characters are all revealed to have astonishingly rich, varied and at times frightening personal psychologies. The burden of realism, especially for non-western filmmakers, is often so strong that characters are reduced to social archetypes, understood as products or reflections of their environments. Demirkubuz’s characters could never be seen as such, yet one never feels that their inner worlds are completely divorced from the external circumstances of these lives. His films allow us to peer into the minds of his characters, helping us to understand where they’ve come from—and to where they might be going.
The film series, “Mental Minefields: The Dark Tales of Zeki Demirkubuz,” contains all seven of Zeki Demirkubuz’s feature films, including the trilogy that for many constitutes the core of his achievement: the “Tales of Darkness” trilogy, composed of Yazgı (Fate, 2001), İtiraf (Confession, 2001) and Bekleme Odası (The Waiting Room, 2003), each a completely separate film but also part of an overall portrait Demirkubuz offers of the concept of morality in the contemporary world.
This series is co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, ArteEast, and the Moon and Stars Project in collaboration with Altyazı.
Richard Peña. Mental Minefields: The Dark Tales of Zeki Demirkubuz. Eds. Zeynep Dadak and Enis Kostepen. New York: Altyazı, ArteEast and Moon and Stars Project. 2007.
