Patterson upset over rumors casting shadow over ‘Dark Cloud’

The festival, like each event of its type, had its winners and losers and ups and downs and received its share of criticism and praise from festival-goers and critics alike.

The big winner at the festival’s national feature competition, “Bahtı Kara” (Dark Cloud), İstanbul-based US filmmaker Theron Patterson’s first feature film in his adopted homeland, became the focus of attraction not during, but after the festival -- albeit in a rather unfortunate fashion, with a cloud of speculation surrounding its win in three major categories: best film, best screenplay and best actor.

“Bahtı Kara,” a bold experimental take that features improvised acting in its entirety, was clearly one of this year’s most anticipated films for its unorthodox technique, but the film was not able to impress critics following its screening at the festival although the national competition lineup, a 10-title selection that included four films that already had their theatrical releases and five that already ran in October’s Altın Portakal fest in Antalya, was already not satisfying at all for film critics to begin with.

Surrounded by accusations that the film did not deserve the prizes it won but did so because of its producers’ professional links with Hülya Uçansu, the head of the national competition jury at the festival, “Dark Cloud” -- like its name and the fate of its title character -- made an unfortunate start to its big screen venture.

Cinema Web sites were abuzz with discussions on “Bahtı Kara” during the week that followed the Bursa festival. According to Tayfun Şahin, who first raised questions over the awards on the Web site sinemaloji.com, the reason why “Dark Cloud” won was that Bulut Film, the film’s İstanbul-based production company run by Yamaç Okur and Nadir Öperli, is professionally linked with Uçansu, who is claimed to serve as an advisor for films that are produced by this company. The link between the founders of Bulut Film and Uçansu is that all three people know each other through Boğaziçi University’s Mithat Alam Film Center (MAFM), where Öperli and Okur used to work previously and where Uçansu is currently a member of the executive board.

“This is a vague connection,” Patterson said. “Uçansu is a board member at MAFM, which is where Yamaç used to work, but he’s not working there anymore,” explained the filmmaker-instructor in an interview with Today’s Zaman. “Every jury member at a given festival has a connection to one or more filmmakers [whose films are running in that competition] -- especially in this country,” he added, pointing to Turkey’s tiny community of filmmakers and producers. “That’s not a sufficient connection to cause a conflict of interest. And even if they had this connection, does that mean that Uçansu is so unprofessional that she would let her connections affect her decisions?” asked a clearly upset Patterson.

The reason why he is so upset is not only the inglorious start his film had, but that this accusation has also upset Uçansu and has the potential to hurt his producers, even leading them to lose their credibility. “It’s so ridiculous, all of the assumptions people are making. Why is this such a big deal? We make our film with good intentions, we get an award, and suddenly that’s the only thing people are talking about,” Patterson complained. “This is coming from a single person,” said Patterson, “and its based on a personal hatred. It is as though he is on a mission [to damage us],” he said about Şahin, who claimed in his article on www.sinemaloji.com that the jury’s decision was rigged. Şahin also claims in his article that Reha Özcan, who won the best actor statuette for his portrayal of Adnan, the big loser in the film, was living proof that the film did not deserve the prizes it won because Özcan said in his acceptance speech that he was “not expecting to win this award.” “All this controversy is based on silly gossip,” Patterson commented.

In the film Özcan portrays a man whose life goes downhill after the untimely death of his beloved wife, left with his troubled teenage son, trying to make a living but facing (sometimes funny) troubles each time because he is so unlucky that it is as if he is living with a dark cloud over his head. Combining comedic elements -- which give the film a tone close to popular cinema -- with a deep study of its main characters, and even tragedy, the film recounts a segment from the life of Adnan and his son and their larger family, who have to take care of the father and son during troubled times.

Bringing out the bad

The 37-year-old filmmaker, who decided that İstanbul is the place he wanted to spend the rest of his life when he first came here as a tourist around 10 years ago, has been living and working in İstanbul for the past eight years, which is quite an adequate time to get to know one country, its film industry and its ways. “Is this the way to develop Turkish cinema?” asked Patterson. “These are serious accusations, and the people involved are professionals. They do everything they can to support Turkish cinema. To be treated this way in return is an outrage.”

Patterson, however, is still confident. “If anybody can show real evidence [that the jury’s decisions were rigged], I’m ready to give back my awards.”

“I struggled for 16 years to make films until I met Bulut Film’s producers. I’ve tried to get support for my projects, and nobody gave me that support. Until then, I made everything by myself.” The director, who also serves as an instructor at Bahçeşehir University’s cinema and television department, has made a number of short films, which he sent to around 300 film festivals and all somehow got rejected. “I’ve had numerous meetings with many producers, for many projects. So this really means so much to me that these people [Bulut Film] believed in me. And for them to engage in such a risky and difficult project was very important.” “Considering all that we’ve been through throughout the nearly three years [we have been working on ‘Dark Cloud’], facing this upsets me. [My producers] are doing this for the sake of independent cinema in Turkey. This is one reason I don’t like film competitions; they bring out the bad in everybody,” he said.

Asked when “Bahtı Kara” will get its theatrical release, Patterson says this will not happen until at least March due to a surge in the number of Turkish films being released this season.

Interaction as in real life

The film is unorthodox in many ways, but particularly for its acting as all the characters, created through rehearsals that lasted for months, are portrayed though improvised acting, without reciting prewritten dialogues from a script. However, despite what many people wrongly assume and thus ponder “How can a film that does not have a screenplay win the screenplay award?” “Dark Cloud” in fact does have a script: a script that is the fruit of many years of work, which had a completely different story in the beginning and which evolved as Patterson reworked it for around five years until he found what he says is its “core.” “[I was] deepening the characters [every time I rewrote it]. When I was writing the fifth or sixth version, I had this experience, a certain scene from the film came to me.” And that was the point he discovered that his script now had a story to tell, the story of Adnan -- the big loser -- an everyday character.

The bold decision to make the acting improvised was something Patterson had in mind from the very beginning. “The thing I’m impressed with the most is to see the way people interact. You see it every day around you, but when [the dialogues, the interactions] are written in the traditional screenplay format, that natural feel is gone. I worked on it for 12 years. So I decided I will tell the actors what I want exactly [and let them create their own dialogues]. I created conditions where the actors would react the way I want them to -- manipulating them to react in a certain way, creating specific situations for them to react the way I want.” This was the hard way round, though, as one specific scene took some 14 hours to shoot, Patterson recalls. In all, the cast rehearsed for one month before they started filming, working on the synopsis that intentionally did not include an ending.

Still, despite all its difficulties, the director is determined to employ the same technique in his upcoming projects. He has two more feature film scripts he is currently working on, and as enthusiastic buffs of avant-garde films might expect, both will be experimental films with improvised acting.

But Patterson has now set his sights on TV. “I really want to do something for TV, but it has to be something different. [Something of the same] quality as in series made in the US and the UK in the last decade, like ‘The Sopranos,’ ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ or ‘The Office.’ Now that I have made a name for myself, maybe I can [attract] some people to my TV project,” he says.

Cinema as a humanistic art form

Although the experimental approach, the improvised acting and the slow flow of action in “Bahtı Kara” might suggest that the film is an artsy attempt, director Theron Patterson says his film stands at a point that can neither be categorized as an art-house film nor a blockbuster. “For us to be [seen as] ‘artists,’ we have to make something ‘serious.’ It is hard to forget about this [expectation]. But I don’t find artsy work very sincere. Comedy is my real voice. Anybody should be able to watch my film and enjoy it. This is what is humanistic about cinema,” Patterson says.