Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 10, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The negative material was developed at the film laboratory at ARRI’s Munich location, where Turkish ARRI colour timer Süeda Yamac also supervised the video dailies for editing. The editing itself (Ayhan Ergürsel) took place in Turkey. The recently opened ARRI Film & TV branch in Cologne was responsible for postproduction, where digital colour timing was carried out in the director’s presence in the brand-new, spacious grading cinema equipped with state-of-the-art equipment (Barco DP90 projector and HD monitors).
With the world premiere of “Bal” (Honey) - an official competition entry at this year’s Berlinale - screenwriter, director and producer Semih Kaplanoglu once again demonstrates his mastery of bringing to the screen, in an enchantingly calm visual language, a narrative that is both poetically dense and interwoven with moments of magical realism.
Kaplanoglu, born in 1963 and regarded as one of the legitimate successors to Turkish master director Yilmaz Günay (“Yol”), sees himself, with his preference for often minutes-long static shots that expose the viewer to the pull of an unfamiliar, actionless sense of time, in the tradition of Robert Bresson. The multi-talented filmmaker’s latest film is also the conclusion of his internationally acclaimed and multi-award-winning “Yusuf” trilogy.
Together with the two preceding chapters, “Yumurta” (Egg) and “Süt” (Milk), which premiered in Cannes (2008) and Venice (2009) respectively, “Bal”, perhaps the most ambitious Turkish cinema project of recent years, reflects, in a kind of backwards biography, stages in the life of the poet Yusuf, who must find his own path between the extremes of a homeless modernity and the only apparently intact world of a childhood in traditional Anatolia.
While “Yumurta” introduced the poet as a middle-aged man and “Süt” portrayed the shy, indecisive boy on the threshold of adulthood, in “Bal” we finally encounter Yusuf as a child, roaming with his father, a beekeeper, through the untouched, mysterious forests of Anatolia near the Black Sea coast in search of bee colonies, and shaped there by experiences that foreshadow the course of his future life.
