METEORS
A film by Gürcan Keltek
2017, 84 minutes
2017, 84 minutes
No. 230
Documentary
Documentary
Description
Gürcan Keltek’s poetic first feature captures a critical moment in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict via otherworldly black-and-white images, largely filmed with disarming immediacy by local villagers in Turkey's southern border with Syria.
Meteors repurposes this archival footage and combines it with intimate interviews and oneiric scenes of life in Southeast Anatolia to yield a panoramic view of Turkey in a moment of existential and political upheaval; the reverberations of the fight for Turkey’s future find expression in mountains dotted by rams and hunters and chaotic city streets littered with debris and protesters alike.
Transcending fiction and nonfiction to arrive at a political truth somewhere in between, Meteors is a transfixing work featuring a cosmic ending not to be missed.
Festivals
Winner, Cinelab Award, Locarno International Film Festival
Winner, Best Documentary, Bratislava International Film Festival
Winner, Human Rights Award, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema
Official Selection, Art of the Real
Official Selection, International Film Festival Rotterdam
Reviews
"Like Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light, this poetic documentary finds deeply painful but also awesome connection between cosmic phenomenon and a nation's internal bloodshed: the occurrence in 2015 of a meteor shower over Turkey at a time of martial law and violent repression of the Kurds. In beautifully grainy video, the luminous streaks across the night sky rhyme with and contrast against the gunfire and smoke of government action."
— MUBI Notebook
“A powerful work of art. Turkish filmmaker Gürcan Keltek uses a meteor shower as a metaphor for human conflict in this film.”
— Little White Lies
“The trauma of a state crackdown on one village finds celestial expression in this poetic film... The Turkish filmmaker has found a Shakespearean dimension to a suppressed news story in his native land: In 2015, the murder of a Turkish soldier, allegedly by members of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), led to an immense and brutal crackdown by the state, directed at separatists in south-eastern Turkey. It was a full-scale military assault whose fatalities have never yet been properly assessed, and led to a grim curfew – none of which made it on to the news.”
— The Guardian
“Meteors charts the inexplicably invisible war-torn landscapes of south-eastern Turkey... Co-opting internet uploads, foreign news reports and sometimes CCTV, Keltek drains the colour from all the imagery, creating a sense of visual cohesion between these disparate records. This gives an immediately unifying sense to this collage of place and a memorial hue to the devastating histories visited upon it.”
— Sight and Sound
