Im toten Winkel

No pun intended - imaginary friends are something that kids have, right? What if they seem to know a lot? Because while this starts off as a documentary (or found footage movie - do not worry, if you were though, there is more to it), but goes to drama quite quickly. Then also adds some supernatural almost horror like to it all ... do you believe in Ghosts or Spirits? Are you a believer in the otherworldly I guess is what I am saying.

The movie has different sections - and while I thought at first it might be too repetitive at first ... it is not. It is more about telling a story ... but also shine a light on an issue that may very well exist ... telling it in a dramatic kind of way, may take away a bit of the heat it otherwise would have had ... shocking moments included ... and not what you may think it is ... from the first segment ... which ends with a bang (no pun intended) ...

It was quite a surprise that the Kurdish-German director Ayse POLAT was awarded the GERMAN FILM AWARD for best director and best screenplay in 2024. But if you have seen her film IM TOTEN WINKEL, you know that these honors are not unjustified.

Everything takes place in the city of Kars in northeastern Turkey. The Turkish Nobel Prize winner for literature Orhan PAMUK has already set his novel SCHNEE there, at an altitude of 1768 meters above sea level. In Ayse POLAT's film, the somewhat naive director Simone (Katja BÜRKLE) from Germany has traveled to Kars with her cameraman Christian (Max HEMMERSDORFER) to film the old Kurdish woman Hatice (Tudan ÜRPER) during a very personal ritual. Simone is interested in imaginary monuments and recognizes this when Hatice prepares a certain soup every year in memory of her son who disappeared without a trace and distributes it to all the neighbors in her village. The young Kurdish woman Leyla (Aybi ERA) acts as a translator and also has her little English student Melek (Cagla YURGA) with her. Melek sees and feels more than the adults would give her credit for. What Simone does not suspect is that she and her small film crew are under constant observation. One evening there is a loud knock on Simone's hotel door...

A very mysterious story is told here from three different perspectives. Little by little it becomes clear how everything is connected and what role Melek's Turkish father Zafer (Ahmet VARLI) plays in it. The conflicts between Turks and Kurds have by no means come to a standstill in the past quarter century; in fact, they still have an impact. All of this is told in the form of an exciting political thriller. But be careful! A genuine ghost story, in the person of little Melek, sneaks into the bitter plot quite imperceptibly. The past is never dead, it is not even past. And: the sleep of reason produces monsters.

Admittedly, this is a rather complicated film, but it is very easy to understand through the chosen visual language. A bitter twist, however, is that the German woman, who is also the director, is unable to interpret the images correctly. The language spoken is German, English, Kurdish and Turkish. This film is well worth seeing, you should definitely get involved in this monstrous event!

"In The Blind Spot" experimented with an original format of building one compact story from numerous individual plot lines with the use of documentary-like features that lend the whole picture a very realistic yet also mysterious appearance, for sometimes we can't see behind the still stationary camera for the sake of deliberately hiding some actions from viewers. What was a great move, in my opinion, was separating the story lines into chapters, although not in chronological order, as it helps the audience to keep track of all the connections that are happening on the screen. Ayse Polat, the director, cleverly ended the first chapter with a huge cliffhanger that makes the viewers wanting to know more from the story and where its going. Eventhough some questions raised in the beginning are left unanswered and the audience needs maybe a little bit more imagination and power of visualization to put the puzzle pieces together in the end, I would say it is still a film worth watching because of its extraordinary approach.