My Father and My Son Review

Çağan Irmak opens on 12 September 1980. Sadık, a left-wing journalist, cannot find a car to get his wife to hospital because the army has taken the streets; she dies giving birth in a park, and he is arrested and tortured. Years later he brings the boy, Deniz, a small dreamer who lives inside his comic books, back to the Aegean farm he walked out on, where his mother fusses over them and his father Hüseyin will not come to dinner.

The middle of the film is warm household comedy, a tractor-driving grandmother, a great-aunt nursing a grudge and a boy discovering all of it, while the script holds back the reason Sadık came home. It is not hard to guess. Çetin Tekindor gives Hüseyin the weight of a man who would rather lose a son than admit he was wrong, and Fikret Kuşkan and Şerif Sezer both took acting prizes at the Istanbul Film Festival.

The coup is backdrop more than subject, and the last act stacks grief on grief under Evanthia Reboutsika's insistent theme. It is unashamed, and it sold more than three and a half million tickets in Turkey, largely because the performances make the manipulation feel like family.