Gelecek Uzun Sürer

GELECEK UZUN SURER (THE FUTURE LASTS FOREVER) begins with a haunting image of a horse running across a deserted landscape and being shot down with a gun. This direct reference to Sydney Pollack's THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY (1969) sets the tone for a film that focuses on the sheer waste of life during the so-called Kurdish conflict that dominated Turkish history in the Nineties and beyond, and continues to this day. In light of recent events in Syria, the issues raised by this film have become even more significant.

Sumru (Gaye Gursel) is a doctoral student from Istanbul traveling to the east of Turkey to do research on elegies. At the film's beginning, she sees her work as divorced from politics; it is simply a means to obtaining an academic end. She gradually becomes involved with local resident Ahmet (Durukan Ordu), and together they visit various places where the conflict - and its consequences - has been most keenly felt. Along the way they interview various family members who have lost loved ones: most of these interviews are shot with a single camera pointing at the interviewee, interspersed with reaction shots of Sumru and her colleagues.

Director Ozcan Alper has constructed a leisurely narrative, with long shots of the rolling eastern Turkish landscape interspersed with close-ups of the main protagonists. This is a low-key film in terms of tone - a strategy that only served to underline the horror of the events discussed. Many families in the region have experienced the pain of torture, familial loss, and unwarranted intrusion by troops; but their stories are often excluded from the 'official' narratives of recent history. Alper's film serves to bring them to light once more. The allusion to Pollack's film underlines the cheapness of human life - especially for the generals (and other leaders) involved in the conflict. Someone has to get killed in order to fulfill one's ends. Yet Alper suggests that no one - not least the local residents - has any real clue what the conflict is (or was) about any more.

The film's narrative closes with Sumru's mysterious disappearance, and a return of the horse galloping across the screen once more. The image serves to remind us that individuals count for nothing in this conflict - not even the so-called protagonist of Alper's film.

This is definitely a political film and maybe this explains why the fact that the two protagonists never establish a romantic relationship.This would weaken the pro Kurdish's sentiments that the narrative tries to evoke to the viewers.I cannot comment on Turkish history since i don't know much, one thing i know is that the recent generation of Turkish filmmakers tend to show the beauty of their country via cinematography.I like films that are focused on images not on the narrative flow, even though this will make some viewers to discard this because they feel bored.The horse symbolism was too obvious and redundant.Still i think that so many images of the vastness of mother nature render human conflict insignificant...So maybe it would be more effective in an ideological level the background of politics to be the city scape and not remote territories.Sometimes the issue of alienation between characters seems a little contrived especially in pastoral settings.I recommend the film to people who consider cinema as an art and not as entertainment.