İn Turkey (and in Arab countries as well) there is an entrenched tribal custom according to which if a female commits adultery, broadly defined as any sexual acivity outside of marriage at any age, it is the duty of the males of the family to kill her in order to preserve the honor and good name of her family or clan.  This tried and true age-old custom is known as "Töre" in Turkey but just plain "murder" in most civilized countries. Fortunately this primitive blood-curdling tradition is now slowly dying out in rapidly modernizing Turkey, however the fact that it is still far from completely gone is attested to by the fact that "honor killing" is a fairly frequent subject of Turkish television series and has come in for movie treatment in several recent films.
 "Saklı Yüzler" (Hidden Faces) by politically engaged femme director Handan İpekci (author of the scenario as well) is an ingenious vivisection of this still ongoing social atrocity in the form of a fiction film taking place in both Turkey and Germany, where a Turkish director has been shooting a documentary film precisely on this unsavory subject. The movie starts out in a cinema in Germany where a harried looking young Turk is watching a documentary film about a teenage girl from a small country town who was very nearly a victim of the nefarious code of "Töre", but managed to escape to Germany thanks to the intervention of a secularly enlightened public prosecutor (also a woman).  In the documentary being shown in Germany with German sub-titles the victimized girl, Zühre, sits with her back to the camera as she relates her tale of woe, and all other faces are blacked out, but the young man who is himself a member of the murderous clan in question recognizes her voice and reports back to the family elders in Turkey.  The body of the film is a flash-back reconstruction of the affair with a local boy which led to her pregnancy and condemnation, (he later commits suicide), her rescue from ritual murder by the town prosecutor and relocation under a new name, then her relentlous tracking down by the obsessed males of the family under the guidance of an insane uncle who insists that "the job must be finished".
 
"Hidden Faces" is a hard-hitting thriller that flies squarely in the face of the oppression of women in traditional Turkish society with no holds barred. The dynamic young actress who plays Zühre, Şenay Aydın, certainly does not submit to the insane code of "Töre" lying down, constantly calling the men of her family "muderers" and, ın one scene, literally spitting in the face of one of her oppressors.  All roles are well acted to the point where one really begins to hate the uncle and can't wait to see him get his.  He will finally get knifed to death by his own younger brother but not before he finishes "the job".  This film is an in depth study of varıous points of view and personal conflicts surrounding this bizarre and brutal social syndrome, a bit overcomplicated and ambiguous in parts, but powerful, nevertheless. The young college audience İ watched it with seemed engrossed but not particularly disturbed by the subject matter, as the "töre" syndrome is now viewed as a bizarre custom comparable to lynching in the American south, but pretty much a thing of the past except in extremely conservative regions of the country far to the east of here in the time warps of Eastern Anatolia.
 
Alex Deleon. Eskişehir. May 9.

The 10th Eskişehir (Turkey) Film festival opened on Saturday, May 2 on the spacious modern-looking campus of Anadolu University wıth a flourish and gala celebration worthy of many an A-festıval. While this festival is relatively minor sandwiched in between the big Turkish festivals of İstanbul, Ankara, and Antalya, it has a truly international flavor and offers extraordinary hospitality to foreign visitors in a forested college campus setting with handsome modern buildings, guest houses, and landscaped gardens that looks like it might be the Anatolian branch of UCLA.
The Anadolu University is, in terms of enrollment, the largest university in Turkey and this very well endowed institution of higher learning has extensive property holdings all over the cıty. The 2008 edition of the festival will run for ten days and present some 72 fılms from many different countries including a number of recent Turkish films and a selection of outstanding films from other festivals.

In the latter category are included such recent festival hits as Matin Scorcese's Rolling Stones documentary "Shine A Light", which opened the Berlin festıval earlier this year, "Persepolis", a Cannes jury prize winner ın 2007, and the Romanian feature "4 Months, 3 weeks, 2 Days" by Christian Mungiu, which took the Golden Palm at Cannes in 2007. Also on tap is this year's Oscar winner "No Country for Old Men".

Chosen to open the festival was the latest offering from Russian Aleksandr Sokurov, a film entitled "Aleksandra". "Aleksandra" is the unusual story of a Russian grandmother visiting her grandson, a Russian army officer, at the army base where he is stationed in Chechenya. The old woman sharing the crude life of the soldiers in the camp comes to the wry conclusion that "even if our soldiers smell like men they're still just boys". The film is of interest, among other things, because it provides a rather intimate look at Russian day-to-day military reality, but ıt has that brownish look of old Soviet films and was subtitled in Turkish which was an obstacle to foreigner visitor comprehension.

Among foreign guests here are Geneva based Swiss director Jacob Berger who is presenting a French language drama entitled "Une Journée" (That Day) and Dutch filmmaker Henk Penninga with a poetic documentary entitled "The Old Dike". The latter film takes viewers on a tour of "the longest street in Holland". The street in question is the pathway atop the sea wall or dike running for some fifty kilometers along the Friesland coast originally constructed as a bulwark against the sea back in 1505. Today it is a residential road with house numbers running from 1 to 1229. Henk is accompanied by his producer and wife Wicke and the two of them run a small film festival in Friesland in the city of Leeuwarden northeast of Amsterdam.

At the opening ceremony among a number of honored guests receiving career awards were the most popular Turkish movie star of all time, towerıng six foot three Tarik Akan, 59, and actress Hale Soygazi, a former Turkish beauty queen in films since 1973. Mr. Akan, who is kind of a cross between Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston, has appeared in over eighty Turkish films since 1971 including the legendaty Cannes prize winner of 1982, "Yol" (The Way) directed by dissident director Yilmaz Güney by remote control, so to speak, from a prison cell in Turkey. After being released from jail Güney died in exile in Paris in 1984. The reception following the opening night film was a very lively affair w (...)