The plot of IZ-REC is straightforward: elderly Kurdish matriarch Seristan (Melahat Bayram) expresses a wish to be buried in the village where she grew up. Her son Mirza (Necmetting Cobanoglu) and grandson Hevi (Bilal Bulut) travel with her on the lengthy train-journey from Istanbul to Diyarbakir, and subsequently on to Batman in the east of Turkey; on the way Seristan passes away, and the two males are faced with the responsibility of transporting the coffin the rest of the way. They negotiate several obstacles: some obdurate Turkish police officers who refuse to let them travel by road, and they subsequently have to make an arduous mountain-climb. However they eventually fulfill their objective. M. Tayfur Aydin's film makes some trenchant points about the ways in which the Kurds have been forced to adopt alien ways of life - for example, being forced to speak Turkish in public. The main focus of interest is on the past, especially on the way in which Seristan's village was completely destroyed by the Turkish army, leaving nothing but rubble behind. IZ-REC is a lament for a lost way of life, for communities forcibly torn apart by an invading force; and for indigenous populations either massacred or colonized. The photography of the inhospitable landscape in the east (by Emre Konuk) is breathtaking, while director Aydin frequently emphasizes - through repeated use of long shots - the insignificance of individual human beings within this landscape. At the end of the film, we do not feel satisfied that Mirza and Hevi have accomplished their task, however arduous it might have been; rather we feel a sense of irretrievable melancholy at Seristan's suffering (as she watched her husband butchered in front of her many years previously) and the consequences, both for her family and the community she once inhabited.
