For the Turkish film "Zefir" of Belma Bash, who won the prize for the best screenplay
The Powers of Nature
Turkish film "Zefir" ("Zephyr"), who won the prize for the best screenplay of 30. Istanbul Film Festival, make one exceptional postcard of nature setting in proportion with the human being. Just through her stateliness, through her liveliness and pulsation she tells her story about one young girl, for emptiness which she brings in herself, for longing and anxiety which are always here, not giving her the possibility to feel and to unite with the beauty which surrounds her.
"Zefir" is a story for a little girl who gets in teenage years and who is in constant anticipation of her mother. In her dreams, her mother is the one who brings the fear for uncertainty, and the beauty and the home, love, care and belonging. Same like the powers of nature and their eternal incalculability.
Young Zefir is constantly sitting on the hill and watching the road expecting that one day her mother will appear, that one day the burden which constantly is in her heart will disappear. Grandmother and grandfather take care of her as much as they can, but like her grandmother says, they can't replace her parents. Zefir has no father, while her mother has own life in which there is no place for her.
It's very interesting that Bash tells us this story without any pathos, without tears, without blaming. All the calamity and tragedy director of the movie is telling us by making a parallel with the swell of life of the nature, with beautiful landscapes, sometimes overwhelmed with diversity in color, sometimes dark, sometimes gray and muddy, but always full of life. Although that life, apart from all his vibrations, just passes by Zefir, pass and leaves behind traces, magnificent, strong, powerful, leaves behind such impressions that delight us, as much as disturbing us. Because in them continue to live that restlessness and longing, that incredibly sad look, that unflagging desire and fantasy of young Zefir, that one day the picture will get the last piece in the puzzle that brings to live.
The idea of the young director Belma Bash is fascinating. In this film she will talk about all remarkably simple things, archetypal situations of belonging, of the need to be loved, of imperative for care and attention, of the need for the family which gives you the most important thing, sense for herself, for her own place and identity. Through the aggression and through the indifference, through the need of Zefir to inflict the pain, even sometimes to destroy the fountain of life, the movie very symbolically talks about interruption of the balance of nature, which always has the consequences in the cycle of the natural laws.
The pain of Zefir, which culminate in the movie from scene to scene, Bash is following fantastically visual, with very good dosed rhythm, whish such spontaneity and illusory tranquility, while the swelling of life in the nature and in the soul to young Zefir unfolds almost parallel. Zefir can not unite with everything around her, until finds her own peace. And the peace will come when she find a way to keep her mother. That, Bash will show through big symbolic scene when Zefir accept the lost of cow Negris, while through her eyes, with which the film begins, the world now has a different reflection.
"Zefir" is a film for the restlessness and love it’s a film which in the same time is painful and elating, because Bash succeeds to find real measure to talk about the nature and her strength, about her power to bring peace and restlessness to her always unpredictable and unexpected way. The author here shows the natural togetherness of life, generally, which regardless where and to who refers, follows the same rules and codes. That is to say, in the nature are our power and our evil too, especially when the nature took his own course.
Suncica Unevska
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