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The Rebirth of Memory
An Interview with Turkish Filmmaker Yesim Ustaoglu
by Dominique Arel, filmfestivals.com

Forty-four year old Yesym Ustaoglu created a stir five years with Journey to the Sun, the first contemporary Turkish film dealing with a Kurdish theme and (a good portion of which) actually shot in Turkish Kurdistan. Her new feature film, Waiting for the Clouds (Bulutlari Beklerken), addresses another taboo topic in Turkey's painful past: the fate of Greek minorities during the First World War. Ms Ustaoglu sat down with filmfestivals.com following the international premiere of her film in competition at the Montreal World Film Festival.

Why are you drawn to topics that are so politically charged in Turkey?

I grew up in a region of Turkey bordering on the Russian Caucasus, which we call Northeastern Turkey. This was historically a heavily multiethnic area, home of the Kurds and of a lesser-known Caucasian minority, the Laz-both of whom are still around. But this is also where a large number of Armenians and Greeks lived. The Armenians and Greeks vanished as a group, but many individuals of Armenian and Greek descent survived under a Turkish identity. This is what Waiting for the Clouds is about: the story of an old "Turkish" lady, Ayse, who is rediscovery her Greeks roots and her Greek name, Eleni. Identities in Atatürk Turkey are state imposed. But I have long been interested in the other identities that lie beyond the surface. Even my first film, The Trace (1994), although not "ethnic" in its focus, dealt with the repressed identity of a policeman who had been a torturer under the Turkish military regime.

The mere fact that you are able to make these films suggests a new openness in Turkey towards historic minorities. Yet it takes guts and courage to make these films. How are they perceived by the authorities and the public?

Shooting on location in Northeastern Turkey is difficult, as the area is under strong military presence [because of the Kurdish question] and we had to play a game of cat and mouse with the Turkish police during production. But they couldn't catch up with us in the mountains! Still, times are changing. Journey to the Sun premiered at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival the day that [Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Worker's Party, responsible for several terrorist attacks] was being returned to Turkey after his capture. There were security guards at the door during the post-screening press conference. But the film was well received in Turkey. [The film tells the story of two teenagers who become friends in Istanbul. When one dies, the other decides to bring the body of his friend to his hometown, in the heartland of Kurdistan]. We had to distribute it ourselves but, thanks to pirated video copies, it reached a wide audience. I even saw it recently playing in a bus! As for Waiting for the Clouds, we only had two festival screenings thus far. During the Q&A afterwards, some of the questions were aggressive, but most were favorable.

Is what happened to the Greeks during the First World War relatively known in Turkey?

Not at all. The issue was never talked about in public or taught in schools. On that score, a Turkish audience is as ignorant of these events as a Western audience might be. Northeastern Turkey was occupied by Russian troops during the First World War. When the troops withdrew in 1916, the Turkish nationalist government considered the Greeks from this borderland disloyal to the state and decided to move them out. The deportations took the form of forced marches essentially to nowhere, under horrible conditions, as what happened to the Armenians the year before, in a neighboring area that had become the front line of the war with Russia. It is estimated that 300,000 to 500,000 Greeks died as a result. Ayse/Eleni, the main character of the film, was saved by a Muslim family during the marches, was raised as a Muslim, and for sixty years never told anyone about her roots. [The film is ultimately about her attempted reunification with her lost brother who made it to Greece as a boy].

You mentioned the Armenians, the other taboo subject in TurkeyŠ

Things are changing, although there is still a long way to go. The government actually gave permission to have Ararat, by Atom Egoyan, distributed in Turkey. A distributor secured the rights, but made the mistake of showing the film to select audiences beforehand. Nationalist groups reacted strongly and the distributor got cold feet and shelved the film, even though it is legal to show it.

Beyond being a film about the recovery of memory, Waiting for the Clouds is also a fascinating depiction of peasant life in the mountains, and particularly of female characters. As a matter of fact, we barely see any men in the film.

The men work in the city, mostly on construction sites, or abroad. When they are in the countryside, however, they do nothing. When we had to log heavy equipment up the mountain, the women would do it. This is the weight of tradition and the women are extraordinarily resilient. This was difficult for me to accept, but I became so fascinated by the whole gender aspect of mountainous culture that I decided to make a documentary, Life on Their Shoulders, as a I was researching Waiting for the Clouds. I focused specifically on women from the Laz minority, a group that originally came for neighboring Georgia. There were so many things I wanted to show. The documentary became a way of preventing Waiting for the Clouds from being too ethnographic.

The last part of Waiting for the Clouds is shot in Greece. Are Turkish productions in Greece, or vice versa, still a rarity?

Yes, there are not too many of them. We shot the Greek portion of the film after our experience in the mountains. We were all in top shape and found that the Greek crew could barely follow us! That being said, showing the film at the Thessaloniki festival in November will be very important for us. [The film is a co-production with several countries, including Greece. During the press conference, the producer noted, with resignation, that things are not working out with the Greek partner

What are you immediate plans?

In am working on a docudrama, for Turkish television, set in the same area. And I would like my next film project to be about ethnic migrants in a Turkish city. As you see, I plan to continue my own journey about the complex identities of people in Turkey

Dominique Arel, filmfestivals.com

Photo by Bryan Hastings