Turkish Media Spotlight: Korkuyorum Anne

Last night we watched the best Turkish film I’ve ever seen. It’s called Korkuyorum Anne, and although it’s billed as a comedy and it is intensely funny, it also has a sweet story and is very heartwarming. It’s kind of like a Turkish version of Monsoon Wedding, I guess. Funnier, though.

It makes a nice change from all the Turkish art films I’ve been watching lately, which are either really badly made, extremely depressing in a “this is your Turkish life, the only way to escape it is to kill yourself” kind of way, or both. This film actually portrayed some of the good things about living in Turkey, which I thought was a refreshing change. Don’t get me wrong, Uzak was also a fine film, a beautiful film, but its sole message seemed to be that life in Turkey is difficult, impossible at times, and you can never, ever hope for anything better except maybe death. The worst part was watching the protagonist go through the motions of his life and seeing so much of our own lives in that. My friend Gary, ever the pessimist, once told me that people think moving across the world all the time is exciting, but really you’re just trading wasting away in one place for wasting away in a different place. Uzak was about wasting away in Turkey. The protagonist kept going down to the sea and then stopping at the shore and just gazing across the water, this sort of symbolic trying the prison gate and then settling for staring out between the bars, knowing you will never see the light of day. Korkuyorum, on the other hand, was about families who stick together and love each other and laugh sometimes and make lemonade. I need to see more films like that.