The Boston Turkish Film Festival runs from Friday, 3/24 through Sunday, 3/26 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and through 4/29 virtually. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage!
A former journalist turned filmmaker, Ümran Safterr makes the move to feature fiction with Guilt, or Kabahat, which can also be translated as “sin.” In its US premiere through the Boston Turkish Film Festival, Safterr’s debut film doesn’t have much of the stylistic stink of a first-time director, although it does carry the heavy-handed social commentary associated with career journalists. Opening with a quote from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Guilt could also be conceived as a persuasive documentary on gender issues, much like her previous The Sin of Being a Woman. “Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance there is judgment. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own, reflected back from a real mirror,” the quote reads. Subtle, this film is not.
The pubescent Reyhan (Mina Demirtaş) has her first period while spending the summer at her grandmother’s house in a conservative central Anatolian village. The water goes out on the first day, preventing Reyhan from being able to perform ghusl (full ablution). It doesn’t help that she hides her puberty concerns from the older women in her life, but she doesn’t feel safe talking about her body in that way with them. Together with her friend Shukran (Ece Demirturk), she roams the village and nearby town looking for access to a public bath, as well as a pregnancy test for her more spunky friend. All of the women in town seem incapable of anything but gossiping—pushing the plot forward through the power of their sharp and biting tongues.
For a film directed by a journalist set in a religiously conservative village, I was pleasantly surprised that religion wasn’t completely screeded against. In one bit I found amusing, the grandma’s piety is in part shown through her ignorance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It would have been so easy to bring the hammer down on the town’s insufferable traditional women. Most importantly, religion (strictly speaking) isn’t the force constraining the mobility and freedom of the women… it’s a culture of patriarchy (in which women often become complicit). Reyhan doesn’t spend the majority of the film justifying her state of impurity or finding excuses not to exercise her religious responsibilities. She genuinely seems to want the water to return so that she can resolve her predicament without her elders finding out.
For context, in most Islamic settings, women can’t participate in ritual prayer amongst other things after menstruating until they’ve performed a full ablution. Theologically speaking, this is usually understood as an issue or ritualistic purity/impurity which is fundamentally separate from the act of sin, which is something one might be guilty of. That Reyhan immediately feels shame upon menstruation thus tells us something about her community.
As a first-time director, I was particularly impressed with Safterr’s ability to block and stage scenes. In one of my favorite examples, Reyhan and Shukran are making tea in the kitchen for the gossiping adults in the adjoining room (where the camera appears positioned). The whole scene takes place with a door blocking the left third of the screen and the two go back and forth trading places, naturally, while preparing the drinks. With the kitchen on the left of the visible frame, the girls physically block out the other when they reposition themselves. As Reyhan overhears a bit of gossip that piques her interest, she moves to the inside of the frame (closer to the other room). As the new information puts her at unease, she retreats and Shukran fills the space again.
It’s really a fantastic bit of blocking that effectively shows the mental wrestling match Reyhan is having with herself about her puberty predicament. To use the Berger quote, we witness her looking into the metaphorical mirror—facing the judgment of womanhood. Or, to use the title of Safterr’s documentary, the blocking of the two girls carries with it the sin of being a woman.
The commentary throughout comes off about as straightforward as an op-ed—and I don’t know about you, but I don’t come to the movies to watch opinions. One person who did like going to the movies for opinions, though, was North Korean dictator Kim Jung-il, who frequently wrote about the ideological “kernel” of a film as if it were the secret ingredient to every good film (capitalist or communist). The kernel shouldn’t be hidden either, no. Like the three talking points to a lengthy Protestant sermon, it is something every good viewer could walk away with. And Safterr’s Guilt seems to share the same philosophy about cinema. Just in case the reader didn’t get it, Berger frames the story like an overture—effectively demanding a certain metatextual interpretation by association.
I’m probably just overreacting to the pretentiousness of the quote. (Me, complaining about something pretentious? How dare I!) Or maybe it’s because I’m not a fan of Berger. Ultimately, though, my reluctance would be easily remedied if something was done with Berger rather than simply repeating him.
Political heavy-handedness aside, Guilt doesn’t sin all that often.
Guilt (Kabahat)
2022
dir. Ümran Safterr
84 min.
