CH.FILM

Mon père, la revolution et moi Switzerland, Turkey 2013 – 80min.

Movie Rating

Mon père, la revolution et moi

Movie Rating: Pascaline Sordet

Director Ufuk Emiroglu, whose first name means “horizon”, returns to Turkey in search of her father’s past as a leftist extremist of the 1970’s. There she rediscovers the admiration she had for him as a child, and tries to reconcile this with his history of exile, counterfeiting, prison and detachment. She tries to find answers about her astonishing father, the legacy of the revolution and finally her own life.

There is no archival footage and those interviewed are evasive. But thanks to director Ufuk Emiroglu’s patient research and use of animation, she succeeds in conveying her parents’ militant past in Turkey. In the Switzerland of today, she questions them about their lives in what are the most touching moments of the film. Her father is disoriented, never having recovered from the loss of his ideals, reinventing himself as a counterfeiter and spending time in prison. Faced with this man who refuses to see what he has done to his family, Emiroglu finds the right distance. She doesn’t judge, but still asks hard questions. There is unresolved sadness but no rancor. Balancing out the father, her mother, who has bravely survived exile, her husband’s imprisonment and divorce, while at the same time raising two children, is the image of maternal love as stability. At the same time, Emiroglu tells her own story: born in Antalya, "in the midst of a dream" that fell apart, she later identifies with Heidi in la Chaux-de-Fonds. In addition to this particular story that attempts to take on a universal dimension, the film’s strength comes from this unanswered question: how does one live with immigration and reconcile two identities in one person?

22.10.2014

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