Araf

It is an okay film if you don't have great expectation.It shows a good portrait of the dull lower "class" Turkish people's life;their naive yet unreachable dreams,their hopes,their struggles,their obstacles.When they were supposed to go to college,two main characters were working for financial support.They desire the things that is normal for their peers.They feel trapped but they have no where to go,no money on top of those their families' expectations and society's prejudices have weigh on them much more and their struggle to escape in any way crashes into wall.But i didn't like the second half,unlike first half this part wasn't very well developed ,there were things i couldn't understand.End was okay but process could be better.Film made me think but when movie ended,first thing crossed my mind was it could have been better.

"Every moment that we haven't seen, heard, touched or smelled before will start to reverberate in us in a very different way and take another form once we experience it. In Araf, I tried to touch upon those fleeting moments and feelings that can occur." – Yeşim Ustaoğlu

In a disintegrating town midway between Istanbul and Ankara, two teenagers search for something better. A girl (in a luminous performance by Neslihan Atagül) starts to pursue the desire awakening in her body while the boy-next-door hopes that a TV show will change his life.

Molten slag breaks forth. A windshield wiper does not stop rain. And nothing can be the same.

Set in the small town of Karabuk, midway between Istanbul and Ankara, ARAF (Limbo) explores the empty lives of two young people, both of whom work in a roadside restaurant. Olgun (Baris Hacihan) has a drunken father and a mother who becomes so frustrated that she eventually abandons the family; he loves Zehra (Neslihan Atagul) but cannot find words to express his feelings. The teenage Zehra is looking for a way out of her monotonous life; she believes she has found it when she has an affair with trucker Mahur (Ozcan Deniz), but this soon fizzles out, leaving her pregnant and alone. Too scared to tell her family about what has happened, she has the stillborn baby in the bathroom at the local clinic. Once Olgun finds out about what has happened to Zehra, he embarks on an orgy of violence that lands him in jail. Yesim Ustaoglu's film is similar in terms of subject-matter to Pelin Esmer's recent GOZETLEME KULESI (The Watchtower); both explore the lives of young women growing up in rural societies, with little prospect for their futures other than marriage. Too frightened to confess their real feelings in front of their (traditional) families, they are left isolated and doomed to suffer. Rather disappointingly, however, Ustaoglu does not explore her characters in any great depth; while she incorporates several lingering close-ups of Zehra and Olgun in profile, she does not tell us much about their relationship to those closest to them. While understanding the frequent silences - as the characters cannot find words to communicate with one another - the narrative tends to sag in places. At just over two hours, ARAF is perhaps half an hour too long; the story would have been equally effective if it had been recounted more concisely.

Araf/Somewhere in Between which won the Best Film prize in the 2012 Abu Dhabi Film Festival is an absorbing feature from Yesim Ustaoglu.

Zehra and Olgun are waiters at a café in a service station. They live monotonous lives and are going nowhere. Olgun loves Zehra but is not able to express himself. Zehra is feeling suffocated in her house under her strict parents and is looking for a way out. To her it seems that Mahur, a truck driver offers the best chance of escape to a better life.

There is a scene inside a ladies toilet involving Zehra which is reminiscent of Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and in my view director Yesim Ustaoglu goes a step too far. Overall though Araf offers assured direction and very good performances. It is yet another impressive film from the Turkish cinema.

In her 5th feature, Yesim Ustaoglu celebrates the ingenuity of approaching to the story of today. Remarkable observations on regular lives in a small town of Turkey leads a sudden empathy of viewer. In Karabuk, a town on the main road between two biggest cities of Turkey, Istanbul and Ankara, everyone and everything is passing by and that transience causes a strong gap between the present and the future, on its inhabitants. Specifiying this transition point trickily symbolize the zeitgeist of Turkey, stumbling between modern and traditional. In such atmosphere, characters feel the same stagnancy while dreaming about a sudden and easy way to slip through the net, and waiting for a miracle, whatever it's about-money, love or happiness. Such representation of today and -what I like most about Araf / Somewhere in Between is- its bold language, are the elements which make the movie extremely strong and success to make the audience feel being stuck, so an identification.