The Trace (2011) User Reviews

Elegy for a Lost Way of Life

[l_rawjalaurence · 7/10 · 20 April 2014]

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.

In The Memory of Unburied Mothers...

[elsinefilo · 20 May 2012]

"Reç" tells the story of Seristan and her family who moved to Istanbul from an Eastern village years ago. Years do not seem to take away the inevitable bouts of homesickness from their lives. Seristan,an old Eastern woman in her eighties is taken to hospital. Her son Mirza (Necmettin Çobanoğlu) is informed that she developed an inoperable brain tumor. Feeling that she doesn't have much time left, Seristan wants her son to take her back to her homeland, with a last wish to be buried in her village. Her grandson Hevi studies at a college and is in love with a girl named Buse. Hevi feels like he's trapped in an impossible love because she comes from a different ethnic background. It seems like Hevi is the only one in the family-whom a great wave of homesickness swept over. Over the past few years, different ethnic groups have been telling their own stories and their own pain from their own window. Unfortunately, they have opted in to other film-makers who have ethnicized their stories before. In Reç, we have Hevi (Bilal Bulut), a young Kurdish university student who tells her supposedly Turkish girlfriend that his family had to come to Istanbul, he had to de-ethnicize his name and he had to go to a school in which he was educated in a language that he didn't know back then...I can empathize with someone who has had tough time because of cultural and language differences but it does not make sense when one complains that being educated in the official language of the country he lives in placed him continually at a disadvantage with his fellow-men. Criticizing the fact that people are displaced from their village is one thing, criticizing the fact that they had to come to terms with the way of life where they are located is another thing. Besides, in every Kurdish movie, ethnic portraits do not have to be distorted by hostility. In Reç, you see a couple of police officers who ask for IDs from the Kurdish family. The police officers seem to be the artistic (!) representation of the purposely distinctive visage of villains-stereotypical evil Turkish policeman prejudiced against the Ethnic minorities. Instead of creating stereotypical additional characters, Reç should have focused on fewer characters and more on the human side of this story. Only then would it a real cinematic achievement.

P.S Lovemaking scene (Buse-Tarçın Çelebi and Hevi) looks like a ripoff from the movie Sonbahar. Those who have seen Sonbahar will remember Onur Saylak and Megi Kobalazde lying on a bed like two new-born babies.

P.S.S Somebody must teach some English to the one who prepared the English subtitles for this movie. He/ She doesn't even know that the words 'make', 'let' and 'have' are used with bare infinitives (infinitives without 'to').