Director: Volkan Girgin
Writer: Volkan Girgin
Cast: Ayşe Tufan, Ebru Kara, Nataliya Güven, Sedef Pehlivanoğlu
Running time: 8mins
Film festivals cost a lot of money – and so they often struggle to break even, let alone make a profit. With submission fees often posing as the only dependable source of revenue that many festivals have access to, that can make granting waivers difficult. Sadly, this means filmmakers who already struggle to have their voices heard end up even further marginalised.
Stories told by artists from low-income backgrounds, opposition groups hit by censorship, or individuals in nations subjected to international sanctions still need a platform, though. That’s why Indy Film Library’s Saturday Matinees series has returned for a fourth season.
Over the current run of matinees, IFL has showcased brave and creative work from places where monetary and legal constraints have prevented the free communication of political and social issues.
The final film in our free-to-view programme comes from Istanbul-based filmmaker Volkan Girgin. Umut [Hope] is a bittersweet short film, touching on the lives of three different refugees who have journeyed to Türkiye.
The first chapter of the story centres on an older woman (Ayşe Tufan), who is clutching a photograph of her family home as she is transported to hospital for emergency care. Through a sepia flashback, this is revealled to be the home her family was forced to flee by Bulgarian troops, during the decades-long ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the country in the 20th century.
Throughout that period, Muslims had been forced to abandon cultural practices, forbidden from using Islamic cemetaries, and to change their names to ‘Bulgarian’ ones, or face imprisonment. Picking on the minority group ramped up as the Eastern Bloc weakened, and the Zhirkov regime leant increasingly on ethno-nationalism to prop up its ailing project. This culminated in 1989’s euphemistically named Great Excursion – where Bulgaria opened its border with Türkiye, and some 300,000 people left. Apologists claim this was a ‘voluntary’ migration, but the ‘choice’ here was clearly seen as “get out, or worse will befall you” – and this is reflected by the fact half of those who fled returned when the regime fell.
With that context, it is clear why the woman in the ambulance is clinging so desperately to the photograph of the home she left decades before. In the years since, she might have settled in her new country rather than returning to Bulgaria, but that picture and the memories it invokes still speak to her of hope: hope that one day things might get better, that one day she might be allowed to live as herself, and be ‘home’ again. As she undertakes a life-or-death trip to hospital, that hope is all the more potent and impactful.
Many years after this first encounter, we cut to a woman (Ebru Kara) sorting through perceived trash in a factory line. She is there to fish out pieces which will not fit easily into the compactor, but something catches her eye for a different reason. Somehow, the same picture frame has been lost and is now on the way to be destroyed. But she scoops it up, and takes it home – with a plan to use it for her own. A picture of her own home – which we then learn is in Syria – with her family posed in front of it, is placed into the frame. Unable to part with the old image, she puts that in the back of the frame – further signifying the continuity between the two women who have treasured this frame.
Finally, on some remote shore, a third woman (Nataliya Güven) comes across the same frame. It has washed up on a beach, amid various other personal affects, and the debris of an ill-fated journey by desperate refugees to escape Syria. As she picks it up, her daughter asks in Ukrainian what on Earth she would do with it – and she says she will again put a picture of their own home in it, while hoping that soon the war will end to allow their return.
The story clearly has its heart in the right place, and its literal framing device is a sweet, thoughtful way of finding a way to transition from one collection of sad and hopeful feelings to the next. On a practical level, it does also leave the more cynical-minded among us wishing we could warn this unsuspecting new victim not to take this cursed object into her home – as everyone we have seen who comes into contact with it dies. But you would have to be a real piece of work for that to be your main takeaway from this film – which has drawn together three impactful personal histories, to make the important point that while the political establishment might demonise refugees as inhuman sponges, looking to take advantage of their host-nations, they are fleeing from unspeakable horrors – and rather than dreaming of being able to live in the hostile, grey environments of the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany etc, they actually long to be able to safely return ‘home’.
Summing this up, Girgin himself says of his film, “Immigration and Hope are brothers… Throughout history, human beings were subjected to forced migration due to war, disaster and hunger. Every forced migration started with the hope of ‘return’. Most of the time it ended in frustration or evolved into a new settled life. But the ‘longing for the land’ never ceased.”
The film will be available to view for free in full from 09:00 UK time on Saturday the 10th of February, until the end of the weekend, via our Saturday Matinees theatre page. Viewers will also be invited to rate the film out of five, to help determine the winner of this Saturday Matinees season.
As the film is still trying to gain access to other festivals, the page is password protected. Use the code IFLMATINEE2324 to access the film.