BELONGING

a film by Burak Çevik

FEATURE PRESENTATION

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15 • 9 PM
AVAILABLE IN NOVA SCOTIA

2019 / TURKEY / 73 mins

In Turkish with English subtitles

A Q&A with director Burak Çevik will follow the screening

In Belonging, Burak Çevik's sophomore feature, an unblinking eye is fixed on the people and places of his family’s trauma.

Inspired by the violent death of Çevik’s grandmother at the hands of his aunt and her lover, Belonging upsets the expectations of the true crime genre by observing the story from two unorthodox perspectives. In the film’s first half, a cold reading of the police report plays out over searing tableaus of empty Turkish cityscapes, paying homage to the emotive vistas of James Benning’s Landscape Suicide. The second half lets us in on the warm moments of the couple’s first meeting, challenging viewers to psychoanalyze and seek answers in an encounter that may have none. 

Part austere crime procedural, part elliptical character drama, Belonging reimagines the possibilities of narrative non-fiction, and its audaciously disparate halves combine to perform something like an exorcism on his family’s haunted past. —Evan Bower

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