I was attending a screening at !F Is-tan-bul, the city’s new-ish and trendily punctuated indie film festival. I was there partly due to the organizational skills of my daughter. It would not have occurred to me to attend a Danish documentary about the slums of Haiti first thing Saturday morning, but she grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. “This is fantastic,” she whispered half-way through. She wasn’t referring to the film, “Ghosts of Cité Soleil,” directed by Asger Leth, although we both agreed it was by far best thing we had seen in a very long time -- a tremendous piece of journalism and a moving account of the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, as witnessed by two gang leaders who had once championed his cause. As impressed as she was with the film, she was more impressed at a cinema crowded with people who by rights should have been home in bed thinking about their first cup of coffee. A good festival -- and !F has certainly proved itself -- is about enthusing people to do things they might not ordinarily do, to hear and listen to new things and we were entirely pleased with ourselves to be living in a city that works to expand our horizons. So, wind in our sails, we decided to queue up for the next film -- also a documentary but this one about the meaning of life. I add, as an aside, that we have a track record of family cinema marathons. Our personal best is four films on the trot.
We managed to get the last seats to “What the Bleep: Down the Rabbit Hole,” a documentary about quantum physics and the meaning of life. Suddenly the film stopped. A representative from the organizing committee apologized because a) that the subtitles weren’t working; and b) that it was the wrong film. The reels had been rushed from the airport without time to monitor the contents, and it turned out to be the previous film by the same director shown last year. The audience was instructed to either refund their tickets or save them for a viewing of the right film at a later date. We were asked to leave the hall.
Given that the quantum subject of the documentary the notion of a “wrong” film was itself problematic, but, of course, more annoying is that we would have been more than content to watch it anyway. We made our mild protest, but the organizers stood their ground. However, a middle-aged couple was far more vociferous in their disappointment. It was “scandalous,” “disgraceful” and “disrespectful of people’s valuable time.” Mrs. Outraged then uttered the words which shattered my carefully cultivated sense of bien être, the feeling that I am living in a world city that is cutting-edge.
“This could only happen in Turkey. It could never happen in Europe,” she said.
I leave it to quantum theorists to ponder whether she was right or wrong. Of course there are moments in Europeans’ lives when they, too, feel that the post office, the amateur dramatic society or the local hospital lets them down. On the other hand, I guess there is a continuum of disappointment from the Cité Soleil slum Port-au-Prince to Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
I write this because I hear the question asked all the time these days whether Turkey was wrong to be optimistic about its future -- or whether incidents like the death of Hrant Dink reveal a quicksand, a cultural malaise, that will always drag Turkey down. It is not just as they say in Turkish, that we have seen this film before but are condemned never to show the right one on time. It is the wrong question, like asking whether !F should forget about organizing a festival next year. It is the flip side of that highly defensive ultranationalism about which the columns on this page so often complain. It is not that we never make mistakes, but should not be condemned to learn nothing from them.
