FUTURE LASTS FOREVER (Gelecek Uzun Surer)

West Coast Premiere

(Turkey, Drama; 2011. 108 minutes.)

Director : Özcan Alper
Producer : Ersin Celik, Soner Alper
Language : Turkish with English subtitles
Editor : Ayhan Ergursel, Thomas Balkenhol, Özcan Alper, Umut Sakallıoglu
Production company : Nar Film/Unafilm/Arizona Films
Screenwriter : Özcan Alper
Cinematographer : Feza Caldiran
Music : Mustafa Biber
Cast: Gaye Gursel, Durukan Ordu, Sarkis Seropyan, Osman Karakoc, Erdal Kirik

Synopsis : Sumru is a university student at work on a comprehensive collection of Anatolian elegies. When she begins what she believes is a short journey to southeastern Turkey to search for her lover and add to her compilation, she meets Ahmet, a young street vendor selling bootleg movies. Her journey with Ahmet continues to the lands where conflict persists between Turks and Kurds. In the quest to record one elusive elegy, Sumru must confront a trauma from her own past. The exploration reveals the collective experience reflected in the lives of individuals and preserved through the memory of elegiac song.

Additional info :

Director's Biography
Özcan Alper was born in Artvin, Turkey. He studied physics and history of science at Istanbul University. His feature films are Autumn (2008) and Future Lasts Forever (2011).

Director's Commentary on the film:
Across all cultures, elegies are in essence a way of dealing with, and accepting death. But they also imply of themselves an element of defiance and opposition. At the same time, elegies constitute the shared memory of a community’s shared past. In Anatolian and Mesopotamian culture, where the oral tradition is strong, elegies abound. And one of my main motivations with this film is to try to make sense of the present and past through the elegies which lie at the core of the story.

As Sumru endeavours to track down one particular elegy and to consider social suffering, she is forced to address a personal agony from her own past. I feel the story is important not only in terms of examining society at large, but also because it looks at how collective experience is reflected in the lives of individuals. And through looking at this unnamed war that has been going on for the last 30 years and the 17.500 political murders that have been committed under the name of "unsolved cases" I wanted to look at today's Turkey closely.

Film website:
http://www.gelecekuzunsurer.com