Reviews

I have mixed feelings about this film. It is clearly not a strong movie in terms of technique or form in cinema - although not too bad, either. But, that's not the reason why I think of it as controversial. I rather felt uneasy about the story it tells, the kind of scenes the director chose to shoot to tell the story and the causal links he established between violent action and its possible motivating grounds. First of all, I should note that this movie is based on a real event that happened in Ankara/Turkey in 1997 - so it's not fiction. The director has chosen to present violence in all its brutality and that makes the movie very disturbing for its audience. Throughout the movie I kept thinking whether there would be another way of telling such a violent story without actually turning violence into a spectacle. Assuming that the audience is ignorant about the violence that prevails in Turkish society, perhaps the director has chosen to confront them with an extreme level of violence. However, this runs the risk of turning violence into an event to watch or observe - once again making the audience an external element to the story. In my view, if the director really wants to confront the audience/the society, than he'd need to find a way to make them part of the story and he could do this by presenting violence as a sociological phenomenon, not as an extraordinary, unusual, isolated case. And here lies the importance of the causal link between violent action and the motivation behind it. The kind of explanation for violent action presented in the movie is not clear. I was very confused about the causality the director attempts to establish between violence and the motivation behind it. Does the director see the persecutors as some sort of lumpenproleteriat? Are their violent acts a consequence of the rage against middle classes? Does their class position justify it? Or, are these people just bunch of ruffians on drugs? Is it being on drugs that makes the persecutors violent? Or, is it because of their class position? Does their access to drugs have anything to do with their class position? Or, are they just bad people having fun(!)? Or a mixture of all these factors? It looks like, the director sees some connection between these, but his stance is obscure. I think that makes the narrative unclear throughout the whole movie, and indeed, this fuzziness made me question why I was watching all this violence? Where am I in this movie? Is it just an extreme, unusual story that is almost unlikely to happen to me, or is there a connection between my class position, my gender, my morality etc. and such violence? A director, so willing and so explicit about giving messages could have been much unequivocal on that! I was disturbed by violence, but I didn't like to be confronted only (!) by its brutality. If the director wants to confront the audience for being ignorant to the violence around, then he'd have to find a way to tell the social story of violence, not just show violence. Overall, I think violence in all its sorts definitely needs to be a subject to tackle with in cinema and I liked this movie for engaging me in these questions, but I also think that because it is such a vulnerable issue, the directors should be looking for ways to confront the audience without turning violence into a spectacle external to the audience.

I really liked the movie. This is the second movie of a trilogy. The first in the series was "Cenneti Beklerken" and the third one is "Golgeler ve Suretler (Shadows and Faces)". These three movies have very different settings and story lines, but a common theme in all is the issue of morally good vs. bad action. "Is it an individual's moral stance that makes an act good or bad?" " What is the morally good act in a complicated situation?" are the kinds of questions that one asks while watching these movies. Another common element in these three movies is that Dervis Zaim has engaged with one form of Ottoman traditional art in each of them. In the first one, it was miniature. In the third one it's the traditional shadow play (Karagoz and Hacivat), and in this second one, Nokta (Dot), it is the Ottoman art of Calligraphy. Indeed, in "Nokta" (Dot), it is the way Zaim has engaged with the art of Calligraphy that has impressed me most. Reading a little bit about Caligraphy after watching the movie, I have realized how he used it to improve/push the limits of/experiment new forms in cinema. For example, he used Tuz Golu (Salt Lake) like an empty sheet and his camera like a pen and ink, as if he was writing calligraphy. Just like a calligrapher, who'd not lift his hand and his pen until he is finished, Zaim never moved his camera to another setting than Tuz Golu. This exchange between the two art forms (calligraphy and cinema) is impressive. Similarly, the parallels between the dot that was never put in the calligraphy written in the 16th century (the story told in the movie) and the death of Ahmed making him a dot on the lake and a dot that ends his suffering just made the movie a journey to the joys of discovering new details. I feel like one needs to watch it over and over again, each time paying attention to different details hidden in the interaction between the form and the content of the movie.

This is a great movie. In my opinion, it particularly deserves credit for pointing at how difficult it was to talk in and of Kurdish in Turkey at the time (1983). In the movie, no one speaks Kurdish, but it's presence is definitely felt - particularly in the interactions between the teacher & the children and the teacher & the women. So, the movie not only points at the state's ignorance of Kurdish in its education system, but also at the hardships of shooting a movie that recognizes the presence of Kurdish in Turkey. I would strongly advise "On the way to School" (2008) to those who are interested in the subject of linguistic rights and in particular of Kurdish in Turkey. Juxtaposing the two movies would help understand how much it has changed since 1983 - at least in terms of talking of Kurdish if not in Kurdish- considering that Kurdish is still not taught at schools.