'Alterity' at the 29th International Adana Golden Ball Film Festival 2022

Alterity
2011 / 18’ 54” / Black and White / Turkey and United Kingdom
Director: Ergin Çavuşoğlu
Screenplay: Ergin Çavuşoğlu (based on converging conceptual elements from Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar” (1966) and “Crystal & Flame” (2010) by Ergin Çavuşoğlu)
Director of Photography: Emre Erkmen
Music: Music Schubert - Piano Sonata No. 20 and Esben Tjalve
Performed by Esben Tjalve
Editing: Ergin Çavuşoğlu
Sound Edit: Jonathan Cronin
Cast: Dilay Tüzün, Hazel Ece Tüzün, Umut Yontar, Hasan Kaşıkçı, Ahmet Bedel, Yavuz Deveci, İsmet Çavuşoğlu, Zeki Alemdar, Söner Deniz, Şaban Kokaş
Producer: Ergin Çavuşoğlu and RAMPA, Istanbul
Line Producer: İsmet Çavuşoğlu
Distribution: Ergin Çavuşoğlu
Summary:
Alterity was produced in 2011 as a gesture of conceptual engagement and clarification bridging two converging cinematographic ideas. On the one hand, the film reinforces the influence of “brute reality and the asininities of destiny” (Steven Bode and Sara Raza; 2011; Ergin Cavusoglu – Alterity), alluding to Robert Bresson’s film ‘Au Hazard, Balthazar’. On the other hand, it invokes directly in its iconography and symbolism a key element in Çavuşoğlu’s video work from 2010 entitled Crystal & Flame (2010). One screen of this multichannel video installation shows a narrator telling a story about an alternate economy and illicit trade of smuggling that employs children to transport black market goods on donkeys’ backs between the landmine-strewn Turkish and Syrian border, resulting in inevitable death. In Bresson’s film, a humble donkey enacts its own “lumpen via dolorosa, as it is passed on from owner and subjected to increasing indignities” (Bode and Raza; 2011). Alterity thus fuses the two tales intentionally bypassing the ill fate of the children in both stories to depict the donkey as the martyred central protagonist in a suspense-ridden tale of morality and treason set against the rural and rugged scenes of nature. The film was produced in Bressonian ascetic style working with non-professional actors on location in Malkara. The landscape is reminiscent of the one in Bresson’s film - the Pre-Pyrenees in France.