Ömer Kavur fmovies meet with cinema lovers at MUBI with the selection “In the Labyrinth of Time: An Ömer Kavur Retrospective”.
On June 18, we celebrate the 79th birthday of the master director of Turkish cinema, Ömer Kavur. Kavur, who started his cinema journey by adapting Refik Halit Karay’s Yatık Emine with the same name to the big screen in 1974, was one of the directors who had the most relationship with literature in Turkish cinema. Füruzan’s story “Ah Güzel İstanbul”, Yusuf Atılgan’s Anayurt Oteli and Orhan Pamuk’s Secret Ways are the first literary works that Kavur adapted to the cinema. So much so that, Kavur is one of the greatest poets on the silver screen of journeys.
Kavur, who reminded many times of a novelist’s attitude with his introverted style, described his own cinema as follows: “It can be said that I focused more on the themes of loneliness, miscommunication, travel, which means both a physical and an inner journey. I can say that I am trying to draw my view of the concept of time to different points and a different way of perceiving.” So much so that in Kavur’s films, the linear cycle of time is sometimes broken and mixed with the abstract structure of the films. We see in the movie The Journey of the Scorpion that watch maker Kerem goes on a journey to repair a clock tower. In “A Broken Love Story” in this month’s selection of MUBI, the film begins with the final sequence. In Secret Face – in the movie Kavur says, “I can say that a passionate love story is tried to be told in the style of an Eastern fairy tale” – “Only a watchmaker’s face can be so strange and surprising,” says the woman in love. In this film, which tells the story of a quest, we see scenes where clock pendulums swing on the walls.
Kavur films, which tell the stories of people filled with broken loves, journeys, loneliness and lack of communication, as in A Broken Love Story or Hidden Face, will meet with cinema lovers in June and July with the selection “In the Labyrinth of Time: An Ömer Kavur Retrospective”. With five films, including Motherland Hotel and Secret Face, Kavur will go on a journey through time.
Yusuf and Kenan (1979)
Yusuf and Kenan, one of Ömer Kavur’s first period films shot with a social realist language, presents the life of street children in a realistic language while presenting the eve of the 1980 Coup, which was the most depressed period in Turkey’s recent history, in fine detail. The movie, which won the grand prize at the Milan Film Festival in 1980 and achieved one of the few successes of our cinema abroad at that time, will be screened on 7 June.
