Alphan Eseli's debut feature is set in the eastern Turkish district of Kars in 1915 in the aftermath of the Battle of Sarıkamis, another ill-fated campaign where a foreign invading force - in this case, the Ottomans, went into Russian territory without adequate preparation against the barren winter and were destroyed as a result. Adumbrating the Nazis' equally fruitless campaign twenty- six years later, the Ottomans' strategy was a clear example of how hubris supplanted reason in military terms.
EVE DÖNÜŞ (THE LONG WAY HOME) doesn't focus at all on the military side of the campaign, but rather centers on eight different characters trying to negotiate their way through a barren landscape in order to discover sanctuary. They include faithful servant Sacı Bey (Uğur Polat), a bourgeois lady Gül (Nergis Öztürk) and her daughter Nihan, and a good-for-nothing bandit (Serdar Orçin) and his maimed sidekick (Şevket Suha Tezel). The film follows their struggles against the landscape as well as their struggles against one another; as with all groups of people thrown together by circumstance, they seldom trust one another.
For film buffs EVE DÖNÜŞ has strong thematic echoes of Charles Frend's SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC (1953), even down to the stiff upper lip of Sacı Bey as he tries to plan the best time for everyone to return safely to the nearest township. As in the earlier film, the eight protagonists are reduced one by one, as the cold and their own self-interest claim their lives; at the end only Gül Hanım and another woman are left.
Hayk Kirakosyan's photography is stunning, with the camera capturing both the beauty and the savagery of the snowy landscapes. Perhaps the only real shortcoming of this film is its narrative, which tends to unfold at a snail's pace: sometimes director Eseli is more preoccupied with visual beauty rather than telling a story. This is no fault in itself, but sometimes the imagery does not really serve the film's thematic purpose, or when does, it seems rather repetitive.
