What we watched at Filmekimi
With its Istanbul and Ankara legs now over and screenings continuing in İzmir and Mersin this weekend, the Filmekimi selection was marked by death, grief, moral dilemmas and stories drawn from real lives.
Filmekimi, held in Istanbul from 9 to 18 October and in Ankara from 15 to 18 October, has come to an end in those two cities, but it will continue to meet audiences in İzmir and Mersin from 22 to 25 October. For me, this year’s selection was a programme in which impressions carried over from earlier festivals met new discoveries.
I had seen many of the films at the Sarajevo Film Festival, MUBI Fest, the Ayvalık Film Festival and the Adana Golden Boll Film Festival, and had written about some of them here. The ones I saw for the first time at Filmekimi, meanwhile, sometimes led me to rethink those films and to draw connections between them that I had not expected. In this piece, which ranges from ways of coping with death and grief to moral dilemmas that confront us with our own judgements, and from real lives brought to the big screen to the responsibility of bearing witness, I have brought together what stayed with me from earlier festivals and Filmekimi’s new encounters.
All of a Sudden | Source: İKSV
Among the films in the Filmekimi selection that circle around death, loss and grief, All of a Sudden and Everytime, both of which I saw at earlier festivals, keep their place among my favourites. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, which tells of the friendship between the manager of a care home and a Japanese theatre artist diagnosed with cancer, had moved me deeply with the bridge it builds between Japanese and French cinema. With a narrative in which cinema and theatre intertwine, a critique of capitalism developed through the care of the elderly and the sick, and what it has to say about pursuing the impossible, it managed to hold my attention throughout its long running time. I also remember Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, in which grief, guilt, memories and fantasies blur into one another after a loss, as one of the films that meant the most to me this year.