Saw this at the Movies That Matter film festival 2017 in The Hague. I cannot avoid forewarning everyone that it is essential to read the synopsis beforehand, or you will be lost and miss the central theme. This movie is all about the difficulties around adopting a child in combination with hiding the fact afterwards that the child is not your own. This movie distracts too often and too much from the core theme. I assume all those unrelated scenes are intended as social commentary, still interesting to watch. Does not let it confuse you.
Nevertheless, me being unfamiliar with Turkish customs, I still assume I missed a lot of the message(s) that the film makers try to bring across. I think I only got the obvious ones. On the other hand, some things that I noticed specifically, like smoking in the office apparently not forbidden there and similarly in the proximity of a young baby, are both shamelessly shown in this movie, yet seem not intended as social commentary by design.
The very best example of some totally redundant and distracting scenes can be seen at the beginning, where we first witness how a bull fertilizes a cow, and immediately thereafter the birth of a calf. Maybe interesting for someone not grown up on a farm, but it does not add anything useful to the story. And particularly the first scene with the bull is far too long compared with its actual contents.
I scored a 2 (out of 5) for the audience award when leaving the theater, due to being not bad overall but meandering too much away from its central message, while at the same time withholding essential information in the process. The ultimate panic after discovering that their adoption was visible in police records, was a bit sketchy and had deserved more attention. The final scene with a waterfall in full view and our threesome family walking towards it, lost me completely, and I still cannot deduce its significance (suicide out of shame??).
All in all, witnessing how social norms about adoption are influencing everyone's behavior, and to what length the main protagonists go to hide their "secret", is interesting to see, despite it is all a bit alien to us. In our world it is not such a taboo to adopt a child. The tangled web woven kept me awake, and also helped me to plod through confusing scenes that were distracting rather than having a useful purpose.
