Searching For Elegies In ‘Future Lasts Forever’

SEARCHING FOR ELEGIES IN ‘FUTURE LASTS FOREVER’

Hurriyet Daily News
Nov 13 2011

Having impressed the audience with his debut feature, director Ozcan
Alper shows that waiting is worth while with his second feature.

‘Gelecek Uzun Surer’ (Future Lasts Forever) is a harrowing journey
into the heart of the war in southeastern Turkey, not through political
propaganda but through powerful human stories.

For those who had watched “Sonbahar” (Autumn), the inspiring debut
feature from director and writer Ozcan Alper that was released
two years ago, his next feature had become the source of some true
anticipation.

In “Sonbahar,” Alper took the audience to the Black Sea region, where
his hometown is, and told the heartbreaking tale of a political
prisoner released after a sentence of 10 years. The film was
beautifully shot with real characters, some played by local amateurs,
grasping the audience at once from the screen.

For some, Alper was already a promising name with two bizarrely-titled
documentaries: “Tokai City’de Melankoli ve Rapsodi” (Melancholy
and Rhapsody in Tokai City) and “Bir BilimadamÄ±yla Zaman Enleminde
Yolculuk” (Travels On Time Continuum with a Scientist), as well as
the critically-acclaimed short film “Momi.”

Alper’s second feature “Gelecek Uzun Surer” (Future Lasts Forever),
the title an inspiration both from French philosopher Louis Althusser’s
memoirs of the same name and a line from one of Turkish poet Murathan
Mungan’s poems, hits theaters this week as a film that was well worth
the wait.

The film begins with a quote from Italian writer and poet Cesare
Pavese: “When the war ends one day, we have to ask ourselves this:
What are we to do with the dead? Why did they die?” Part road trip
movie, part lament to lost love and part political drama, the movie’s
power to move mostly comes from its heartfelt look at the consequences
of war on individual lives, mostly on women.

Compiling elegies and losses

The central character is Sumru (Gaye Gursel), a young woman who travels
from Istanbul to the southeastern city of DiyarbakÄ±r to research
Anatolian elegies for her doctoral thesis. As she delves deep into
her research, she talks to women who have lost their beloved ones to
the Turkish-Kurdish conflict that has claimed thousands of lives in
the last three decades.

Sumru’s journey becomes a harrowing one as she compiles losses
along with elegies, facing her own loss, the broken relationship she
had left behind in Istanbul. In DiyarbakÄ±r, she makes an unlikely
friend from Ahmet (Durukan Ordu), a pirate DVD seller, a cinephile,
and someone who has first-hand tales to tell of the war in the region.

Gursel might seem like a wrong choice for the role of the bewildered
woman from western Turkey, looking more like a character from a French
film and looking totally out of place. But that seems to be the very
reason why she was cast, hoping to exude a sense of alienation in the
audience. As Sumru gets a feel of the individual stories of the war,
so do we.

A plot revolving around the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, along with a
subplot on the burning topic of the Armenian relocation of the last
century, could easily tread on the waters of propaganda, or at least
become didactic. Alper manages to distance his film from any political
message or emotional drama that could easily have become the tone of
the film. He manages this by shooting the interviews in a documentary
style, with some real footage included into the film.

Alper knows the power of human stories and makes sure that nothing else
does cloud the simple message relayed across through the first accounts
of the war, the simple stories of loss. As the camera moves across the
streets of DiyarbakÄ±r, Alper’s direction, along with the beautiful
visuals of Feza CaldÄ±ran, render the locations at once familiar yet
painfully distant. It is impossible not to feel the sorrow, yet equally
impossible to feel part of that tragedy. Just like Sumru herself.

From: A. Papazian