User Reviews

Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds (Karpuz Kabugundan Gemiler Yapmak) is a most charming film out of Turkey. It follows a teenage boy, Recep, working as an apprentice for the local Happy Watermelon Man. His mother is evil (involved in some unexplained human-ear baking ring), but a nearby woman wants to take him under his wing. "Auntie" as he calls her, is somewhat flirtatious and very much weird. Recep has a crush on her eldest daughter, who resents him.

The youngest daughter is infatuated with Recep, who doesn't take her seriously.

On the side, Recep is also trying to build his own movie theatre with two friends. They've got the film, the wooden projector box, a light and lens. Now all they need is to find a way to manually move the film at 24 frames a second.

Boats is witty, wonderful and at times, weird. It's a what Cinema Paradiso would be if David Lynch directed it. It is not perfect. There is a lull about 2/3rds into the movie that is hard to ignore. But this is one of those rare smart films for the whole family.

First this movie shows that money is not very important to create a movie. The story and the thriller takes you from the beginning to the end. The stories powerful characters are two kids this makes the intention powerful. Both kids are very shy and kindhearted. The story consists of determination, money, love, friendship and the family.

I live in Ankara capital city of the Turkey and I also went to Kutahya before. The point of view is very very good. The life in the villages is like that. These are for real I heard a lot of stories like that. This movie is describes for my grandfather's generation very much. All the persons who are in my age know a lot of stories like that for our parents childhoods. For example my father gives this movie may be 9 out of 10 :) The cinemas takes his attention very much I think.

Not much more to say about movie. Watch it pretty good. I like it very much I think every one will...

A very simple story with amateur casting can not impress me like this ever. It is about a passion of a two young people toward cinema, making their own projector with very primitive equipments. Their efforts are worth watching. Photography is perfect, every scene is a story itself, colored by the beautiful country side. Village and the villagers are so real that you get the impression as if you are watching a documentary about Turkish villages at the same time, showing the lifestyle, language, costumes, architecture, traditions, taboos and everything in a very lean way. A heartbreaking love story throws in a towel, very innocent but impossible because of the boundaries people set for their selves especially in Turkey. It makes you think how bright minds go in vein because of the lack of support or lack of facility. Fortunately imagination is all free. I am sure the filmmakers did not expect a box office, they put forth their hearts to display everything very sincerely and unreserved. Wish they can reach out the crowds.

Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds (Karpuz Kabugundan Gemiler Yapmak) is so naive a film that it resembles to no other film. People who call it another Cinema Paradiso just for the reason that its two principal adolescent characters love cinema, don't make justice towards Watermelon Rinds. Cinema Paradiso is a professionally produced and acted Italian film in which one of the two principal parts is acted by a French star (Philippe Noiret) whereas Watermelon Rinds in which all parts are acted by real townspeople takes all its mesmerizing power from its sheer amateur (natural and warm) quality in everything, especially, in acting.

The way people talk (the agreeable local accent they use) is one of the most valuable assets of Watermelon Rinds. The touching quality of warmth and sincerity of this film makes one think if a really good movie can be done only without professionals (especially without professional actors). You may experience the same feeling when you watch a certain Italian film which is named not Cinema Paradiso but Ladri Di Biciclette. In this respect (and only in "this" respect) you may better try to find similarity between Ahmet Uluçay's "Karpuz Kabugundan Gemiler Yapmak" and Vittorio De Sica's "Ladri Di Biciclette".

Because of the rumors about Watermelon Rinds being just a sort of Cinema Paradiso, I had resented the film and not watched it till now. And now I have realized that the rumors had made justice n'either to the film nor to me.

Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds is in no way a sort of Cinema Paradiso. In fact it resembles nothing but itself. Congratulations, Mr Uluçay!

COSKUN BUKTEL

Watermelons, boats, boats from watermelon rinds - clearly this is a film about childhood! About that special kind of childhood of the East or maybe of the Past!

In childhood every detail is full of meaning, full of amusement, the near future holds grand plans and dreams, in childhood myths can have very real appearances, and there are many many summer minutes to spend with your friends, on the dried meadows of the village or maybe on the imaginary sands of the coast...

A childhood in the East: where townsmen are too poor but have their pride, where they still pay a lot of attention and appreciate the small details, where life repeats its slow rhythms and the future is blissfully far away. In the East myths still can have very real appearances, and there are many many daily moments to spend enjoying the simple blessings of God while waving off the flies in the hot air, chatting with your watermelon customers, or taking a nap!

I should warn you that just like our childhood, the film has no specific finale, it ends unexpectedly, taken away by the circumstances. One day we realise it has been gone for some time already, while we had still so much more plans and business to do with it...!

A humble, monumental and so necessary memory of times that will one day pass, and places that will soon change! Ashkolsun arkadashlar!

The actual nice things in the movie are small details like the secret eating of the walnut by the elder sister,like the scene of epilepsy attack of Deli Omer...- In the beginning of the movie,there was a scene o a cat moving around a man crying which is shot totally incidentally,is making you feel good ,happy but not...and immediately after the dead man comes alive and you feel peculiar... During all the time,during all that childish love stories you actually expect the explanation of that coming back to life scene and it is explained actually in the end when Recep promises Deli Omer to bring alive his dead wife.

This is movie depicts the typical characteristics of Turkish villages and draws attention to the social relationships between people engaging in humor. Another pro for this movie is that although it is a local movie, it draws attention to pure feelings such as love and innocence.

Especially Turkish people should see it as soon as possible, that is because this movie is referred to the Turkish audience firstly. I do not know if another versions of this movie in other languages exist, but if it does, then everybody who sees cinema as an interpretation of pure feelings must watch it.

Personally, this movie provided me with the knowledge about the life outside the urban areas and gave me a great happiness.

Thanks to the director for such an admirable movie.

The director of that movie is a villager living in Kütahya(Turkey)and I'm living in the same city with him.this is his first movie and he recorded that movie with 10.000 USA dollars.

All the actors in that movie are the villagers.none of them r actors.But they create a perfect movie... Can u believe it?And that movie was awarded in various festivals in Europe...What a pure and perfect movie...It presents the pure but emotional lives of villagers and two kids...Watch that movie,it is nice.

First of the director Ahmet Uluçay creates good sense of vision.We can see the pure but colorful lives of people.

What gets old in movies? Effects get old, shooting techniques get old, even acting gets old. When we look at old movies, we see that actors used to be almost unable to cry. This movie also has actors who cannot cry. It's like actors who can cry are a rarity. However, in the reviews of the movies, if they took people who cried their eyes out even for the most unrealistic dramas in the world, actors who could cry would be found very easily. But you know what never gets old in movies? Stories. The things that are told don't get old in movies. I mean, they get old, of course, but they continue to interest people. The best example of this is of course 12 Angry Men. Even though it came out in 1957, it has an interesting story, a plot. So is that what I'm criticizing this movie for? I mean, yes. It has a very strange story. This movie wants to walk on two basic themes. Cinema and love. And then it collects them somehow, so there is progress. But these progressions are so strange. And by strange I mean unrealistic. The fact that movies are forcing love on themselves for no reason is really starting to disgust me more than irritate me. There should be no love in a movie, brother. Let the two kids try to make projections. No, someone has to fall in love with someone or else. This is exactly what happens to stories that have nothing to do with love, but love is forcibly pushed into them. While it would be a beautiful, funny movie, absurd events take place and these events are never told. Then, of course, we have even stranger endings. What happened? I don't know. The writer doesn't know either. It's like the writer just disappeared and asked somebody on the set to finish the movie. I don't want a good ending, I don't want a bad ending. What I want and what the audience wants is a realistic ending. The film is strange, as if it has discovered absurd humor, which is popular after 2020. It's like a comedy movie, not a drama.

Shooting on location is always good. I don't like artificial locations. It's usually grinning anyway. They shot everything beautifully in the village, it makes you want to stop by. Also, they didn't use the weird shooting techniques that were famous at that time, they went for a simple way of shooting and it turned out very well. There is no need for such fancy things, simplicity can be very beautiful sometimes.

The actors seemed warm to me. The most important difference here was that the actors looked like they were talking among themselves rather than reading a script. Maybe this is real, maybe they shot the movie with a conversational technique rather than a script, but at this age, I say health to the hands of the actors.

I mean... Another movie that left me speechless. But not in a positive way. Oh, it's fun, it's fun. It is definitely watchable as an absurd humor movie, but don't expect such a great drama movie.

An semi professional tray but whats is come out one of the best movie in Turkish cinema history. Just think about it ? Main actor's fist and last movies has 8+ in imdb i dont believe there is an other example you can find on wold " of course if actors is not die". The boy who play as an headliner he didt shot any other movie in his life and now he drive buss in his village. So very good camera very good and pure story i really love this movie.

A sort of Turkish "Cinéma Paradiso", this is an account of two Turkish village boys, who take up summer jobs in the nearest town to finance their dream of constructing a working projector, by which to screen bits of film scavenged from the town's one movie theater. One of the boys works as an assistant to a water-melon seller, the other as a barber's apprentice. Both are convinced that this is the first step to successful film-making careers. The events of that summer mark the end of their innocence and their entry into an adulthood that manages to remain quixotic and strangely untouched by cynicism or too much reality. The whimsical day jobs provide very funny ruminations on how to get ahead in the world; as well, in the course of performing these jobs, the twosome offers up lovely nonsensical bits of business. One of the boys falls in love with a local beauty, but, of course, nothing much happens on that front. I loved the detailed observation of small town rhythms, and the ordinary village folk who, upon closer examination, are revealed to be mesmerizing. When the love-lorn fledgling filmmaker talks of his beloved, the considerably older beauty, one understands and empathizes with his plight completely. Seemingly exotic cultural practices and lifestyles become entirely understandable when stripped down to their basic human underpinnings. One of the boys and his mother live in an adobe house with a room containing the grandfather's grave, which, one must concede, is not the most common of living arrangements. At each crisis, however, both mother and son are shown alternately confiding in, haranguing, or cajoling the dead man. Though long gone, he continues to be the spiritual and moral head of their household; after a while, it did not seem the least bit odd that extended bits of dialog are addressed to a mound of earth. Utterly beguiling.

A moving and brilliant film from Turkey with an amazing title that assumes a meaning by the end of it, this one opens with a melodious and melancholic tune that tugs at your heart. The camera slowly reveals to us a watermelon shop, its owner and the helper who is a young painter. And thus starts the poetic tale of our protagonist who is an aspiring filmmaker and a hopeless romantic. We follow Recep, the young lad, as he finds his first crush and battles against insurmountable odds to build a camera that can move images. Recep's passion for Cinema drives him on his quest to find out everything about the camera and his love for the ravishing beauty, Boncuk Yilmaz, keeps him busy in his daydreams. Life moves on, things happen, and the climax is tragic and heartbreaking - but the last few moments are reassuring and full of promises about the journey ahead. But what carries the film into the realms of greatness is the way it is made. Visually gorgeous, the film is soothing on the eyes, with the village, the town, the plains in between, everything shot in a vibrant tone. The architecture of the town becomes a part of the narrative, as does other inanimate things because Ulucay's careful usage of props is charming and quirky, and extremely smart. Any cinephile is bound to fall in love with this film, as it is a true tribute to the process of film-making - the camera building sequences are extremely well-done and made me fall in love with Cinema all over again. In a place and age where films were still considered taboo, the director captures the first effects of moving images on the village children, an old man and a local madman to great effect, yes, a tad melodramatic, but affecting nonetheless. Daily life is given a touch of magic with the beautiful characters and this is, I repeat, a heartfelt love letter to the great medium called Cinema.

Only acting could go wrong in this movie because they're not experienced actors&actresses. I born and grow up in Kutahya, city of the village in the movie. Dialects&gestures were so native and accurate because they're all from this region, almost, including the director. So they know how people living, talking there. As I say, only acting could go wrong but I think it didn't, all so natural.

On the other hand we can describe this as "documentary" about the region. At least, it is a documentary of my previous Turkish dialect.

A Turkish film about two teen buddies living in a rural area. It's the off-season on their farms, so they work as apprentices in the small, nearby town, one for a watermelon salesman and the other for a barber. The two boys are obsessed with movies and they collect scraps of film from the garbage of the local cinema. They want to build their own projector, but can't quite figure it out. The other major plot line has one of the boys fall in love with a slightly older girl, but she treats him like dirt. This film has a bit of charm - it kind of reminds me of early Kiarostami - but, honestly, it's just not that good. It's very amateurish, and both the plot and the characters are sketchily created. Nothing ever feels like it comes together. I had imagined the director was a newbie, but, in reality, he was around 50 years old when he made it and he had made several films beforehand (he made one more before he passed in 2009). I feel like the movie's themes, coming-of-age, cinephilia, young love, were calculated to appeal to the average festival-goer. To me, it doesn't feel honest.

For the last decade the Turkish cinema has been just churning out low-down comedies like Kahpe Bizans and Gora. This movie which has been called the Turkish Cinema Paradiso is one of those rare smart examples out of Turkish cinema.In the 60s in a small Anatolian village Recep and Mehmet are two youngsters, working as apprentices in a small town near their village. Recep helps a watermelon vendor, while Mehmet works with a barber. Crazily in love with cinema, they spend their evenings trying to make a makeshift film projector. One day, Recep meets a widow with two daughters who lives in the town and has come to pick unripe watermelons for her cows. Frequently visiting their home from then on to have tea or breakfast, Recep starts liking the elder daughter, Nihal. As for the girl, she is disturbed by having a peasant boy around the house and treats him as rudely as she can though she is also pretty much interested in catching attention of Recep. Her younger sister Guler, on the other hand, likes Recep, but the feeling is not mutual in that case.Towards the end of the movie we see the watermelon vendor selling all of his product by telling a one-liner: If you build up your ship out of watermelon you will sink down fast.Recept cannot be together with Nihal either because they turns out to have moved before he opens his feelings. So much to dream so little to realize!Impressive but not perfect! The two young actors look artificial at some points though their general performance is satisfactory enough! nevertheless this movie deserves acclaim on the grounds that it's not a potboiler produced out of commercial concerns!