Aus der Ferne

This documentary aims to reflect the Turkey of nowadays from the Director's point of view. It focuses mostly on the suburbs of Istanbul and Ankara, two great cities of Turkey having many nice places besides the suburbs.

However, the director seems to be very keen on the idea that the west of Turkey was consist of dirty and untidy settlements. Another spotlight of director was the children working as labor at low quality works.

This type of scenes comes one after each other probably to focus on how the kinder-rights has been not respected in Turkey. In truth, knowing Turkey very well, I found this as exaggerate as only focusing on suburbs of Istanbul and Ankara.

Going towards east – to the Director's most favorite part of Turkey- the face of Turkey seems to improve little bit despite the mistreated Kurdish and Armenian societies. The director makes an essential gaffe here by saying that thousands of Kurdish people died during the war between Turkey and Kurds. Here, he may need to know that Kurdish people are also citizens of Turkey like others and the war was between Turkish army, which consists of also Kurdish citizens, and terrorists coming from mostly the northern Iraq. He did a similar blunder when he was showing the graveyards of Armenian people by omitting the death of other nations in this region including Turkish.

Quality of scenes in the movie is as poor as its story. Unnecessary long scenes having no message in – for instance the people selecting garbage which represents neither Istanbul nor Turkey globally or locally- or repetition of the same scenes… The director wanted to shoot a political movie to show the grimes of Turkey as someone who has no clue about other nice aspects of Turkey. Overall, it is a disappointing documentary which would mislead people who does not know Turkey like the director.

A road movie originating in the Director's "home town" of Istanbul winding through the country to the Iran border. Just like No Comment on Euro News, the camera reels without comment, (well, except for very occasional comments from Arslan) and thus actually documents points of life along the way. The images are the story. This is a good movie for anyone who simply wants to sit back and experience real life in Turkey without actually going and not have to think too much about the political, environmental, or developmental issues there. The images are sometimes quaint, sometimes striking, though some scenes go on long enough to let the mind wander...outside of the film. For people who have been through Turkey, this could feed their notalgie. Just as Arslan seems in some way, to wax sentimental in his journey following his roots. Come with your curiosity peaked, or you might get sleepy. This film was part of the 2006 Berlinale.