Official Competition 2019

Gulyabani

Gürcan Keltek I 2018 I 35'

SYNOPSIS

Gulyabani is an entity, a ghoul, an outsider: She’s the restless spirit of desolate and lonely place. Fethiye Sessiz, a notorious clairvoyant of Izmir in ‘70s and ‘80s, remembers fractions of her survival from abuse, kidnappings and violence. Recounting the eventsof her childhood through her diary entries and letters to her estranged son, Gulyabani recollects the emotional landscape in the most violent period of post-Republic Turkey.

BIOGRAPHY

Gürcan Keltek

GÜRCAN KELTEK (Turkey, 1973). Born in İzmir, he studied film at Dokuz Eylül University before directing his medium-length film Colony (2015), screened at FIDMarseille. His first feature film, Meteors (2017), was screened at numerous festivals, including Rotterdam, BAFICI and Viennale, and also participated in the Official Section of FILMADRID in 2018, where it received the Special Jury Mention Days of Cinema.

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Critical text

What do Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino), And What Is the Summer Saying? (Payal Kapadia) and Gulyabani (Gürcan Keltek) have in common? Probably more than anything else, albeit with some nuances to the meaning of its original formulation, what Paul Schrader called in his classic studio a “transcendental cinematographic style”. In this case, the ability to express an image of the possibilities of understanding a non-linear conception of time through audiovisual language. The trope: a jinn, a spirit that remembers past lives and meditates on history, the nature cycles, what could have happened but never happened, the present and what is to come. Gulyabani’s 35 minutes are the filmic materialisation of the experience of a transformation: that of its protagonist, that of the spectators, that of the film itself and that of an experience that, in short, escapes and belongs to all of the above. RAMÓN DEL BUEY

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