eskisehir's blog

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.

Dishonor Killing

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 05/09/2008 - 22:57.

I would like to see this film.

Ellen R. Sheeley, Author
"Reclaiming Honor in Jordan"

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