There Where Atilla Passes

16th Annual Boston Turkish Film Festival

March 16–April 2, 2017

The Museum of Fine Arts

http://www.mfa.org/programs/series/the-16th-annual-boston-turkish-film-festival

Twenty-year-old Atilla (Émile Schneider), living with his Canadian parents who adopted him as a child from Turkey, must come to terms with his life, past, present, and future. A horrific memory haunts him—the reason for his transplantation from Turkey to Montréal, from one set of parents to another. His state of young-adult despondency has less to do with “being adopted” than with what his four-year-old eyes witnessed in his original family.

Besides being a story about Atilla’s acceptance of his life—and life the way it is for many, many people—There Where Atilla Passes also portrays with enormous success the pained love of a father (Roy Dupuis) for his adopted son. The director Onur Karaman has let his characters' faces reveal their interior struggles. The film has so few words it would be possible to watch it without the volume on and still fully comprehend the story—until the climatic ending, that is, when Atilla’s memory fills in the last gap of his childhood trauma. That moment goes swiftly with a too-distant camera shot, so that we miss the vital detail of a knife in a hand.

To a lesser degree the film tackles immigration, something that has been going on since the start of civilization. In this case, Atilla is quite assimilated with his Canadian parents and even resembles his adopted dad, Michel. But his heritage is with him, and as he moves through his workday at a Turkish restaurant, he slowly becomes close to the new Turkish cook, Ahmet (Cansel Elçin), the movie’s sage who helps Atilla find his path in life. Ahmet, too, has a horrific family memory and in mounting scenes imparts wisdom to his younger fellow-countryman: “One day you’re alive and the next you’re gone. Once you get used to this idea you can find peace of mind. You grieve and move on. But it takes time, like brewing perfect tea.” Later in the movie, over the tea they often share, Ahmet tells Atilla, “Life is like a short-lived bus trip. You make friends but everyone has their own itinerary. The only thing you share is that bus. Get it? It means appreciate solitude, it’s the only thing that belongs to you.”

At the end of the movie, we watch short clips of each character’s “own itinerary” and solitude: Michel with his deep love and loss; Julie (Julie Deslauriers), Atilla’s pregnant mother, waiting for a baby daughter to arrive; Ahmet in the restaurant kitchen, whistling a cheerful song and laughing at life’s absurdity, his personal tactic for survival; and Atilla with his girlfriend Asya (Dilan Gwyn) at the airport, embarking on his own life.

Again, love, loss, loneliness, and one’s own solitary experience infuse the movie from start to finish, and we understand all of that with our vision and our senses, not from the occasional philosophy coming from Ahmet. We see that a psychiatrist can’t bring words from Atilla to heal his past. If healing is to happen, it comes from within the individual and it never whitewashes memory: grief is always there, but it can be managed.

The movie’s shifting from scene to scene, cutting to the various characters and their habitual actions—the partying Turks led by Selçuk where Atilla meets Asya, Grandpa in his nursing home, Atilla constantly alone outside smoking weed and thinking—can feel formulaic, too much like a click, click, click before arriving at an important scene between father and son—for the father and son relationship is the heart (bleeding heart) of the story. On the other hand, at the end of the movie, some of these more peripheral-character clips add a layer of symbols and messages to the film, such as Grandpa getting closer to dying with his memory zoning out, while Atilla embarks on his own life with memory alive but managed trepidatiously. The arc of flying birds with purpose, direction, and freedom that Atilla watches at the beginning of the movie comes back at the end for his solitary dad to watch. Atilla’s hobby was making model airplanes and his dad holds one of these as he watches the birds soar away. Atilla has just flown to Turkey (and “flown the coop”). Holding one of his models is like holding onto him while allowing his flight, his own life and destination.

Overall, the movie is about love—love that binds a family, painfully, but then that’s what love is—painful. Yet its presence is the only solace to the individual’s solitude and lonely walk through his or her own life. Atilla will be back some day, the family will reunite, but perhaps with oceans and continents separating them most of the time. We do not know, nor do they. But we accept.