Antalya Film Festival: ‘The Sun’s Eclipse’ Shows Life Under Coups

Sydney Levine
SydneysBuzz The Blog
8 min readOct 28, 2016

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Holding the festival is an incredibly difficult task especially after the recent attempted military coup in Turkey. The West cannot lose Turkey, a modern and western nation which is also Islamic and is the literal bridge between the West and the East. The Antalya Film Festival feels it is imperative to show that life still goes on after the coup, and the creative and recreative power of entertainment leads the show.

Military Coup Blocks Bridge Over the Bosphorus — bbc.co.uk

Inspired by the failed July 15th coup, films about life under coups suggest what might have happened had the July attempt succeeded. The Sun’s Eclipse program is a powerful testament to the importance of democracy and human rights, and includes films from Turkey, Brazil, USA, Chile, Argentina.

We in the west often regard Turkey more as Eastern than Western…understanding why leads us to recognize the power of our western version of Christianity (don’t forget Constantine, the first Emperor to be Christian made Constantinople — now Istanbul — the capital of the Holy Roman Empire) and western media push Turkey to the East. But the Turkish people, mixing western and eastern sensibilities overwhelmingly support democracy. And democracy — not just in Turkey but everywhere — is under attack as much as Mosul is.

This year’s Antalya Film Festival’s special sidebar, The Sun’s Eclipse is a unique film program, a powerful testament to the importance of democracy and human rights, and includes films from Turkey, US, Chile, Argentine and Brazil. The film program aims to depict the conditions of life under a coup and to suggest what might have happened, had the failed 15th July attempted coup succeeded.

Elif Dağdeviren, the Director of the International Antalya Film Festival took time to describe the coup as a “weird experience which is hard to understand for the Turks and the rest of the world. In the last ten years Turkey has made great progress in its economy, politics, culture, especially in cinema and in the worldwide mobility of its youth. Things were not perfect, but the idea a a possible coup never occurred to anyone. Two years ago, there were rumors about a group, not an identified terrorist group, but a group which was manipulating people through religion. Then, last July, on the 15th as people were watching TV, everyone witnessed the blocking of the largest bridge on the Bosphorus Sea by the military. They thought it was a bomb threat, or a rehearsal for some military manoeuver and they began calling each other.

That Friday at 8:00 pm, all of the television channels were cut off except for one where a woman made the declaration a coup had taken place. Suddenly no one could find President Erdoğan. The government’s own military, without the knowledge of its top brass, had been planning the coup for over two years and sent bomb squads to kill the family of the President while the President Erdoğan was on holiday. They put him into a shelter. Meanwhile one person from CNN Turkey connected to him on Facetime on his iPhone and he said, ‘This is a coup! Please fight with me.’

Within one hour everyone was in the street supporting him and supporting Turkey as a democratic country. People were for and against President Erdoğan, but all were united and in the street supporting democracy. Voting was a private affair but it was common knowledge that no one had ever voted for the military nor had the military ever asked the people for their vote. The military began bombing the Parliament. There were many frightening experiences. But for people watching from abroad: the Turkish people wanted to send the message that they must understand the issue was the elected Parliament vs. people with guns in their hands. The experience of people in the street, very young people, 300 killed and wounded — there is still no experience of what could have happened if the coup had succeeded. And so the festival will show films to show young people what life could be like living under a coup. When the Turkish coup of September 12, 1980 happened, the Dark Days lasted until the mid 80s.

There have been 373 coups around the world throughout history. Not all have been successful but those that were successful did not help any country. They all had negative impacts upon the countries and their people. There are many good films about this and “The Sun’s Eclipse” will show what happened. Sonja Braga will attend the festival for this event and there will be a panel of directors, producers, actors from the films discussing why they made the films and what happened during and after they made the films.”

“Kiss of the Spider Woman”, Brazil, USA, 1985, directed by Hector Babenco. This Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1986 also won the Best Actor Award or William Hurt in the Academy Awards, Cannes Film Festival and BAFTA.

Set in an unnamed fascist dictatorship in South America, this beautiful, quietly profound two-hander examines the failure of state repression to erode the imagination. Two very different men share a cell in a brutal prison. One, Molina (William Hurt), is a flamboyant homosexual, a window-dresser arrested for corrupting a minor. The other, Valentin (Raul Julia) is a journalist, jailed for his leftist political activities. To make their days more bearable, Molina entertains Valentin by retelling the stories of his favorite movies (shown in sepia-tinged excerpts), and gradually their divisions — of temperment and ideology, of fantasy and reality — first blur, and finally become meaningless..

“Where the Fire Burns”, Turkey, 1998, directed by Ismail Günes. Produced in 1999, “Where the Fire Burns” was censored and banned in less than a week after its opening. It deals with the dark coup period of September 12 and the tortures at the time and tells the tragic story of a university student who is arrested and tortured for days, and then released after proven to be innocent. The student takes a train to his hometown after his release. The film unfolds his memories from the day he meets his fiance until the day he is released. It is not easy for the young man to go back to his fiance since he believes that his identity has been lost after all his ordeal and torture.

“Beyond Rangoon”, U.S., 1995, directed by John Boorman. Cannes Film Festival nominee for Camera d’Or. The dehumanizing cruelty of the military junta in Burma — the country known today as Myanmar — was brought to international attention in this acclaimed 1995 drama, with Patrcia Arquestte playing an American tourist who inadvertently finds herself caught up in the events of of the 1988 coup. Traveling with a group of students trying to mobilize a democratic opposition, she witnesses first hand acts of brutality and repression as she struggles to cross the border and tell her story to the outside world. Boorman directs the action with a sure feel for both the lushness of the jungles and the pitiless cruelty of its oppressors; it’s a work of agit-prop that feels like an artistic statement.

“Olympic Garage”/ “Garage Olimpo”, Argentina,1999, directed by Marco Bechis. Winner of FIPRESCI Prize, Thessaloniki Film Festival, Best Director Award Cartagena Film Festival. An activist working to overthrow the Argentine dictatorship in the late 1970s, Maria lives in Buenos Aires with her mother, who rents out some rooms in their house to various guests — including a shy, slightly mysterious young man named Felix. One morning Maria is kidnapped by soldiers and taken to the Garage ‘Olimpo’, a notorious torture spot. There the military commander appoints his best man — Felix — to make Mara talk. He’s conflicted, overcome by his feelings for her. But Maria sees an opportunity to exploit the situation and ensure her own survival. Based on the director’s own experiences living in Argentina, this is a a tense, powerful study of ideology and individual passion.

“Post Mortem”, Chile, 2010, directed by Pablo Larrain. Venice Film Festival, winner Best Film at Cartegena, LALIFF and Havana (2nd prize) Film Festivals. The partnership of Chilean auteur Pablo Larrain and actor Alfredo Castro has proved one of the most rewarding in recent cinema, and their follow-up to 2008’s “Tony Manero” is a chilling study of individual complicity and willful blindness to evil, with Castro playing a taciturn mortician’s assistant — a blank solitary individual whose dedication to duty does not slip for a single moment, even as corpses pile up in the streets and in his own hospitals, the horrific legacy of Pinochet’s 1973 coup. Shot in bleak, desaturated tones, it’s a kind of ghost story, set in a world either dead or dying, with one man’s amorality and psychosis standing in for the sickness of an entire nation.

“The International”, Turkey, 2006, directed by Muharrem Gulmez and Sirri Süreyya Önder. Moscow, Thessaloniki, Warsaw Film Festivals and winner for Best Film at Istanbul and Ankara Film Festival. Set in 1983, the film tells the story of a townsfolk and a music band trying to adjust to the military government conditions. A group of local musicians in Adiyaman province starts to have financial difficulties because of the curfew. The solution that they find gets them all arrested. The military commander of the region wants to turn this group of local musicians into a contemporary orchestra. The musicians are to play at the welcoming ceremony of the Council members. However it is not only the musicians looking forward to the welcoming of the Council members, but also the young activists of the city. Totally unaware of each others’ plans, the preparations by the martial units and revolutionist youth create a mess.

“61 Days”/ “Iftarlik Gazoz”, Turkey, 2015, directed by Yüksel Aksu. A political comedy about the coup period of the 1970s in this third feature by Aksu tells the story of a fifth grader and his master, a soda seller. Living in an Aegean town, Adem does not want to waste his summer break and finally gets permission from his parents to work as an apprentice for Master Kemal. It is the beginning of Ramadan’ and after hearing what the Imam says at the mosque about fasting, he decides to fast. However, it is not easy to fast and sell soda on hot Aegean summer days; especially when the penance for breaking the fast is 61 days of fasting.

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Sydney’s 40+ years in international film business include exec positions in acquisitions, twice selling FilmFinders, the 1st film database, teaching & writing.