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CONTEMPORARY TURKISH CINEMA Bekleme Odası / The Waiting Room 2003, 94 minutes, 35 mm, color; Thursday, October 7, 8:00 PM
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The third film in the trilogy, Tales about Darkness, Bekleme Odası (The Waiting Room) tells the story of Ahmet, a director who wants to film Dostoyevsky's classic novel Crime and Punishment. Although Ahmet considers himself a conceited and faithless man, others perceive him as an idealist who lives by his principles. While in the grip of a disquieting disinterest in both his personal life and his film, Ahmet decides to cast a thief he had once caught trying to break into his house as Raskolnikov, the novel's lead character, even though he has no idea where to find him. Bekleme Odası is a film that asks whether positive values such as spirituality and solitude can be the deliberate choices of egotism and arrogance. Can the exalted positions which used to be granted only to heroes as a reward for their suffering suit the selfish, morally troubled anti-hero of today? Zeki Demirkubuz says: "In the five films that I have made until today, I tried to narrate the stories of tens of people. However, after each film I saw that filmmaking itself has human situations, suspicions, questions and themes that are at least as powerful as those in the films. Having personally experienced them had a separate allure to itself. This idea that first hit me after making Üçüncü Sayfa (The Third Page) became a real thought after Yazgı (Fate). Ridding myself of my anger and emotions and the subjectivity that comes from having lived through it took two more years. And in the end a film that I thought accomplished at least these things - a distanced film that had no biographical or personal characteristics - emerged." Festivals and Awards 2004 Valencia Film Festival (Spain ): FIPRESCI (International Federation
of Film Critics)
Award From Atilla Dorsay Hints on Life This is the story of a director who attempts to adapt Fyodor Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment. But Demirkubuz seems to be doing something that he has already done with Yazgı (Fate): exploring leading existentialist Albert Camus's novel The Stranger once again. We watch the story of a person who - just like the protagonist in The Stranger - is indifferent towards his surroundings, towards society and even towards women - and whose ability to communicate has weakened significantly. I think there are countless similarities between Ahmet, who struggles to adapt a classic, and Zeki. Would he take the lead role himself if it were otherwise? Demirkubuz, who says "film is a religious matter" through the mouth of the director in this movie, seems to be revealing to us the point at which he meets Dostoyevski's mysticism. One can read under the picture of Dostoyevski in Ahmet's room the phrase "Everything is possible if there is no God." Demirkubuz makes us feel that he is a director who has a problem with religion and belief. In this sense, the mystical Russian novelist and the French novelist, who question the place of humans in the universe meet each other in Zeki in a way that does not surprise us. Demirkubuz presents us a film that is told in extreme simplicity, which many will regard as boring, but personally, I admire the film's plain and spotless language. The director not only tells us about himself, his art, the difficulties of making a film, and his regrets afterwards, but also heavily criticizes himself through secondary characters, particularly Elif and Kerem. Perhaps he tells us that an artist is someone who has to be selfish. How else could he focus on his art? 2004 (Excerpt)
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