“Who remains at the top of the hierarchy when we don’t need it anymore?”by Valerio Caruso
28/04/2016 - Cineuropa sat down with Turkish director Tolga Karaçelik to discuss his film Ivy[*], winner of the Cineuropa Prize at the Lecce European Film Festival.
[*] Sarmaşık aims to sail to her loading port in Egypt to carry goods to Angola. When the ship arrives in Egypt, it becomes clear that the ship owner has not paid the port fee and that the ship has been foreclosed. Port authority officials pull the ship to the anchorage zone. A team of 6 people will need to stay on board in case the ship has to be moved while there: a machinist, an officer, two sailors, a cook, and a master sailor. As their passports are seized, the crew starts to wait on Egyptian shores for an indefinite period of time. Small conflicts grow into big fights as the food and beverage supplies run out and the ship turns into a battlefield where men hunt men.
Tolga Karaçelik is part of a new generation of Turkish directors, known for his own unique style. After a number of shorts and music videos, the filmmaker made a splash with his feature debut, Toll Booth, which earned him the Antalya Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Orange Award for Best First Film, and also won the festival's Best Cinematography and Best Actor awards. Cineuropa caught up with the director to discuss his latest film, Ivy, the winner of the Cineuropa Prize at the Lecce European Film Festival.
Cineuropa: What was the main motivation behind this film and its theme?
Tolga Karaçelik: The real motivation for Ivy came when I came face to face with the Turkish authorities, to be honest with you. So the main question of the film became “who is at the top of the hierarchy when we don’t need it anymore, and how do they try to maintain status quo?” The ship isn’t moving, so what do we do with the captain? From there, I looked at what I have been facing in my own territory and that made me come up with this concept. What do leaders, like the captain usually do? I tried to look at the bigger picture and the power struggle between these six characters from that point of view.
What were some of the difficult parts of shooting the film?
During shooting, while shooting in one location, there were always difficulties trying to continue a story visually without becoming boring, while still giving it that claustrophobic feeling. But there were also some easy bits to shooting in one location: you can always go back to the scene that you shot. It’s something you have in the back of your mind – you don’t lose any location while shooting. So it has its pros and cons. It’s also hard shooting on a ship, with all the equipment and stuff.
How did you go about trying to create the feeling of five months passing in just two hours?
For me the biggest issue in filmmaking is about rhythm. The rhythm of the characters starts with the dialogues, and also the rhythm of the film. After deciding each character’s rhythm and the film’s rhythm, there comes this issue of time. I believe that the concept of time, through its uniqueness and unity, is something that you can make sincere or insincere in a movie. At times, I tried to combine this concept of time and deal with it as a single unit. I wanted it to feel like an oppressive blanket over them. That’s why I chose to use kind of smooth camera movements. While I wanted the idea of time to always be present, I didn’t want the audience to be thinking about how many days have passed. I think in only one instance I say something like “50 days”. Other than that, we don’t talk about the time. So that was kind of a challenge for me: to give the impression of those five months passing through the acting and dialogues.
Is there a specific reason behind the six characters you chose?
Well, firstly, it had to do with the law. According to maritime law, six people have to stay in a ship like that: one from the engine room, one from the kitchen, two seamen, one able seaman and a member from the captains’ class. But all these characters represent something in this power struggle, and they are similar to the characters you'd find on a Turkish cargo ship, where there are three or four main groups you fall into: dopers, alcoholics, the religious guys, and so on. I tried to have one character from each group. I also tried to convey the Turkish society in that way. They don’t symbolise it directly, but because they are characters they do carry their social and economical backgrounds with them.
As a jury, we were impressed by the use of sounds and music; how did you work on making such a bold soundscape?
In a movie like this, which takes place in only one location and uses absence of sound as a threat, we had to put a lot of thought into it. With music, this was how I felt it had to be. There wasn’t a lot of music only a 1970s Turkish rock song and what we made on a synthesiser. I wanted this music to be part of the sound system, and we designed sounds and music together. That was our aim, and we looked at it as one soundtrack, which I think more and more people are doing in the film industry.
How was the film received in Turkey when it was released?
The film won four awards at the Antalya Film Festival: Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor. It also won Best Director and Best Actor in the International Ardana Film Festival, but we couldn’t compete at Istanbul because of the censorship issues. It was only released in 12 movie theatres across Turkey, and we weren’t able to get any television pre-sales, because the film is seen as kind of hard and tough, and wouldn’t have been able to be shown without censorship. It’s unfortunate because this is a huge source of income for movies like ours.
Why did you leave the film’s ending so open?
My main idea was about that certain period of time, how do people react to each other and this power struggle, and when do they break? After that, anything else would be a different movie. I also found using Cenk’s last question to Ismail to let the audience decide what happens kind of romantic. I enjoyed this romantic, open ending for the film. My focus of the movie was up to that point, after that it can be a thriller, it can be anything. I didn’t want to label my characters as a killer or as a loser.
What can you tell us about your next project?
My next project, which is called Butterflies right now, has been to the Sundance lab. I’m excited to be making this kind of dark comedy about three siblings coming together in their home village after 30 years. It’s the same time and place as in Toll Booth. I think I will be shooting it in 2017, but it all depends on whether we can receive backing from the Ministry of Culture or not. Things in Turkey are complicated right now: last year we were supposed to have four sessions, but didn’t have any, and this year we had one, so I don’t know how it will go.
Ivy: Exploring the decay of conventions of all kinds by Mirona Nicola
07/07/2015 - KARLOVY VARY 2015: Tolga Karaçelik's second feature, Ivy, displays narrative and visual mastery as it tells the story of workers on a cargo ship who become ridden with despair
Ivy: Exploring the decay of conventions of all kinds
Tolga Karaçelik's second feature, Ivy [+], displays narrative and visual mastery in exploring the decay of conventions of all kinds, as 6 workers stuck on a cargo ship become ridden with despair and cabin fever. In its structure and tone, this original psychological thriller bares a clearly expressed literary influence, the strongest being Coleridge, whose poem The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is used as a way of demarcating its three parts.
Men of unequal ranks on the vessel, as well as in their faith and moral principles, the central characters all have different reasons for volunteering to stay on board- introduced through a series of fast cuts. Beybaba, the captain, does it out of a sense of duty. Ismail, who becomes the captain's right hand, and Nadir, now left as the main cook, need money to eventually improve the condition of their families, so they hang on the promise that they will be first in line to be paid all they are owed once the situation of the bankrupt shipowner is clarified. What got stoners Cenk and Alper on the ship in the first place was the need to stay away from trouble they've gotten themselves into. As for Kurd, his motivation remains a mystery, as do his personality and intentions. His massive frame, constant silence, and peculiar physiognomy will only provide more reason for the other 5 to doubt their sanity and fear for their lives along the way.
Contemporary Turkish cinema has come to be associated with the slow-paced picturesque style of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. But while director of photography Gökhan Tiryaki (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep ) is also exerting his craft in Ivy, the result is very different. After the swift introduction of the characters, bursting with light and color, the visuals settle in a mellow palette of the ocean's blue and the dusty tones of the ship and the worker's orange overalls.
As the food supplies are decreasing, the pace of the film dwindles, time dragging by as slow as the snails that keep showing up on deck. The camera lingers with the characters as they go about their dull days and helps translate the crumbling of authority, in a scene such as that in which an angry Beybaba ventures out of his cabin and calls all men to deck trying to re-instate his command. As he is about to go back in, a hammer is thrown in his direction, but the director pertinently withholds from the viewers who actually threw it; the most likely suspect is short-tempered Cenk, but at this point it could have truly been anyone.
With no end to their situation in sight, the men start turning against each other, the mistrust and anger growing and spreading like the poison ivy the title references. The disappearance of one of them deepens the crisis and his apparent return as a ghost in the third act throws the characters further off the already precarious balance. A series of fights, all threatening to resume to fists, build up to the final spiraling out of control, when an infusion of magical realism brings a new and appropriately timed spin to the story.
What it ultimately resolves to is not an external solution for the 6 characters. As they have had to manage by themselves up until now, they will also be the ones seeking closure according to the new 'rules' they have co-developed in their chaos and despair. The ending will disappoint those who were hoping for either a happy resolution, or a Shakespeare-like body count. Karaçelik is faithful to his characters and thus more preoccupied by their solace, than by that of viewers that were hoping for a clear-cut denouement.