SALVATION (KURTULUŞ) World Cinema

Emin Alper’s provocative allegory examines how long-simmering grievances can be stoked by a charismatic leader into hatred and violence, where religion gives way to madness, and a struggle for political leadership gives way to authoritarianism. In a remote mountain village in eastern Turkey, the resident Hazeran clan are disgruntled over the return of their rivals, the Bezaris. The Hazerans fought in a local militia to repel a recent terrorist attack and protect the Bezari land they work as tenant farmers, even as the wealthier Bezaris fled to the city. While many of the Hazerans believe by rights they should now own the land, neither the law nor their clan and spiritual leader Sheik Ferit (Feyyaz Duman) counsels this. But when Ferit’s older brother Mesut (Caner Cindoruk) begins to have waking dreams and dark visions, first about his wife, then about waging war on his clan’s rivals, he is thought to be a divine messenger and put forward as the clan’s new Sheik. Soon one man’s troubled dreams become the playbook for a massacre. Alper’s film is partially based on a tragic 2009 event in Turkey’s eastern province of Mardin, where one family attacked another’s wedding party, killing 44 people. But the story Alper imagines in SALVATION resonates far beyond these real-world specifics. There is something timeless in Alper’s tale — not for nothing is the story of Cain and Abel debated here. In Alper’s movie we see how an imagined or exaggerated threat is obsessed over by a leader, hammered on and amplified until a shared psychosis takes root among his followers, then leveraged into previously unimaginable violence. For audiences everywhere, this tale from the Turkish hinterlands may hit surprisingly close to home. –Todd Hitchcock