Distant(2002)

Release Date: Mar 12, 2004 | Limited

After his wife leaves him, a photographer has an existential crisis and tries to cope with his cousin's visit.

Releases

Original Release | Mar 12, 2004

Box Office

Sound Mix: Dolby Digital

Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1

Country of Origin: Turkey

Yusef (Mehmet Emin Toprak) leaves his small town and travels across barren snowy lands and roads to the port city of Istanbul to seek employment and stay with his cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir). Yusef spends many snowy days seeking work on a shipping line to discover that a hiring freeze is activated, but is bolstered by a sense of hope in the city which is a contrast to what he has known. Mahmut is a successful commercial photographer and his ordered life is disrupted by the presence of his cousin and this exacerbates his concern with his ex-wife Nazan (Zuhal Gencer Erkaya) who has remarried and is leaving to live in Canada with her new husband. When Mahmut leaves town on a photo shoot he hires Yusef to accompany him as an assistant which puts some money into Yusefs hands. Mahmut receives word that his mother is sick and he leaves again to tend to her leaving Yusef alone in the house, and returns to find that his cousin has not kept the house clean and neat which cause the two to argue. Yusef walks the streets sometimes following an attractive girl (Ebru Ceylan) he has seen but cannot find the opportunity to speak with her. Mahmut follows his ex-wife, Nazan, to the airport and watches as she and her new husband leave the country. Yusef and Mahmut each live in isolated world and makes decisions that bring about the subtlest of changes in their lives, changes that have great consequences.

Mahmut, a 40 year old independent photographer, is a "village boy made good" at least professionally in the big city - Istanbul in this case. After his wife leaves him, he falls into an existential crisis. Then comes his cousin Yusuf, who left his native village after a local factory closed down, effectively unemploying over half the local men. He looks to Istanbul for salvation: a job on board a ship sailing abroad, at once exciting and crucial to supporting his family in the desperately poor village. The distance between the two men is apparent at once, and becomes increasingly pronounced. Whereas Mahmut is adusted to big city life and suffers from many of its neuroses, Yusuf is a lonely, excentric country worker with annoying nervous and hygienic habits, and a sick mother back home he must somehow support. This intimate drama was filmed in the director's apartment in Istanbul, using all his furniture, appliances, rooms, car and so on as the film's props. The actor playing Yusuf is actually the director's real-life cousin, and the actor playing Mahmut is an actual friend, a non-professional actor. — Gonz30