Inflame / Afternoon of Ceylan / Ozgün Özçelik

New Horizon / New Horizon Section

Black Canvas 2017

Religious intolerance has been one of the great problems of mankind, wars fought in ancient Jerusalem still exists in the present, as well in Europe and in the United States, becoming in our days a serious difficulty for governments. One of the centers of this problem is the communication, the lack of it and the censorship of the same, exercised by both the state and the mass media as by ourselves. The director Ceylan Özgün Özçelik shows us a Turkey where these practices are present and transcend the social, being installed in the psychology of the individuals who move in a country where the conformism of the middle classes that the film shows us becomes perverse.

Hasret, a publisher who works for a television network setting up documentaries, lost her parents as a child in an event she does not remember at all. Despite this, she leads a normal life with several friends of the wealthy class of Istanbul. One bad day she must edit the chain’s news information and she discover the horrible censorship that exists in her workplace. This will be obsessing her, leading her to reflect on what really happened to her parents. Based on this premise the film envelops us in a dream blanket, composed of a complex and symbolic narrative, which the protagonist interprets magnificently. It is with her perspective that we enter an emotional spiral between the dream and reality, empowered by the camera in Hasret’s subjective point of view at various moments of his journey of discovery.

It is a story that seeks to express an openness of eyes both social and individual, a narrative that comes to reflect the delicate moments that the country has experienced in its recent history, where censorship has played a fundamental place. Elegant lighting and beautiful scenery are the setting for a painful but charming journey of revelations that change lives and groups, especially in these times where it seems that information is available to all, not only to consume it but also to produce it however, paradoxically, it has led to a comfort to the canned material and the shortness of social networks.

Pablo Jofré López / Historian and Audiovisualist