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In a display of authoritarian punishment, the principal (Mahir Ipek) of the Turkish boarding school where Ferit Karahan’s Brother’s Keeper is set seeks to remind the 11-year-olds under his care that they should feel lucky to be there. They get a stellar education (while having the Kurdish beat out of those who come from the Kurdistan region). They get three square meals a day (a pathetic ladleful of three creamy liquids and half a bread loaf to dip). And they’re even allowed to shower once a week (such luxury). Unfortunately, as a clandestine phone call home reveals (cells are off-limits), these prison-like conditions are luxurious to some. Most of these kids come from poor families of nine children with no real opportunities.

It’s thus unsurprising that a hierarchy of power forms throughout the building, whether amongst the adults, the children, or the obvious imbalance between the two.

"Back to your places!" Altered Innocence has released an official US trailer for an indie drama from Turkey titled Brother's Keeper. It originally premiered at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival last year, and also played at the London and Chicago Film Festivals, among many others in 2021. Yusuf and his best friend Memo are pupils at a boarding school for Kurdish boys, secluded in the mountains of Eastern Anatolia. Set over the course of a tense day at an isolated boarding school, this moral drama follows a boy's desperate fight to save his sick friend in the face of a rigid bureaucracy. By the time the adults in charge finally understand the seriousness of Memo's condition and try to get him to a hospital, the remote school has been buried under a sudden, heavy snowfall. Starring Samet Yildiz as Yusuf and Nurullah Alaca as Memo. This looks like it has some impressive cinematography telling a heartbreaking,...

Oliver Twist meets “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” in Ferit Karahan’s sophomore feature, “Brother’s Keeper.” Set in a snowbound boarding school on the eastern edges of Turkey, the film tells the story of a boy desperate to get help for his sick friend yet stymied at every turn by bullying teachers and corrupt administrators. While Karahan (“The Fall From Heaven”) builds the narrative in a resolutely effective manner, ensuring the child’s increasing desperation gets under the audience’s skin, the scenario’s predictability and the stereotyped depiction of the adults impede emotional involvement.

Institutional coldness typifies everything about this large school situated in a neglected part of the country, staffed by cruel instructors perpetuating an age-old cycle of abuse. Showers are allowed only once a week, the hot water (when there is hot water) a welcome relief from the frigid climate and the broken heating pipes. But when some boys get unruly,...

Turkish director Ferit Karahan’s second feature “Brother’s Keeper” was awarded the Fipresci prize in the Panorama competition of Berlinale which had meatier films to offer – for instance, the likes of Carlos Alfonso Corral’s feature debut “Dirty Feathers”, or Damien Odoul’s “Theo and the Metamorphosis”. Despite of its many flows, it is a film that will stick in one’s mind for its depiction of life in a remote boarding school for Kurdish boys in Eastern Anatolia, cut off from the rest of the world by mountains and the long, cruel winter months.

Brother’s Keeper is screening on Berlinale

The story plays during one night and one day against the backdrop of a heavy snowfall that presses even harder on the already secluded life in a school where discipline is everything. The kids live under harsh conditions, with broken heating, heavily rationed food portions, screamed at...

The chill of anxiety is written all over the face of little Yusuf (Samet Yildiz) through most of this boarding school drama, a fearfulness borne, if not of direct experience then most certainly of expectation and something that has long since settled on him and his schoolmates, piling up like the snow which falls constantly outside.

There are few things more vulnerable looking than a child in a towel, and that's where Ferit Karahan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Gülistan Acet, begins the action, as the kids queue for their weekly bath, where they share a bucket, three to a cubicle. Although we never see the sticks that the masters frequently carry employed, like the children, there's always a fear that they might be. Horsing around is not tolerated, punished by the insistence that the kids wash in cold water, under the watchful eye of a slightly older prefect, petrified,...

For the students at a remote boarding school for Kurdish boys, survival is a matter of course, particularly during the frigid depths of winter. The meals are meager, the heating doesn’t work, and even the principal’s car won’t start. Even if it did, he can’t afford snow tires, rendering his vehicle useless in the thick blanket of snow that covers the Eastern Anatolian mountains. All one can do is endure, and fifth-grader Yusuf (Samet Yildiz) has learned that keeping a low profile will spare him the exacting punishments the teachers dole out on his more rambunctious classmates.

Continue reading ‘Brother’s Keeper’ Is A Damning Study Of The Ruthless Inertia Of Bureaucracy [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.