News

In the early moments of “Commitment Hasan,” Turkish writer-director Semih Kaplanoglu’s slow-burning morality tale, one could mistake the titular character for a weak, vulnerable individual others routinely walk all over. Portrayed with a quiet sense of stealth by Umut Karadag, Hasan is a fairly prosperous farmer and gardener tending to the family land he inherited from his father, a windswept, fecund place of tomato fields and apple orchards. In the opening sequence, he puts up a silent and losing fight against an arrogant engineer who drops by his plot unannounced and informs Hasan that an electrical pylon would soon be erected right in the middle of his field as part of the government’s plan to enhance the region’s power grid. Hasan sheepishly protests: Why wouldn’t they reroute the expansion and choose the vacant neighboring field instead? Predictably, his objections fall on deaf ears.

Soon though, Kaplanoglu...

Movies with children protagonists have always been a vehicle for a more “tender” way of commenting on social, political and philosophical subjects and Uyghur director A. Uygur Ozturk does exactly that in “White Whale”, in a film though, that is much more than just a children’s movie.

The screening of White Whale and the subsequent conversation with the director was co-organised by Ccdc Artspace 碧波押 – Green Wave Art Platform, Anthropocene Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Department of Film Studies, King’s College London.

The story takes place in the 80s, and revolves around Ali, a young boy whose father died years ago in a ship accident. Through his mother’s reading, he discovers “Moby Dick”, and makes a subconscious connection with his father that, later on, shapes his life in ways he could have not anticipated. Alas, his mother also passes away a bit later, and Ali ends up living with his grandfather,...