Bergen

Bergen (2022) tells the life of a real singer, and in Turkey this has stopped being one person's story. Belgin Sarılmışer, who performed as Bergen, was one of the most listened to voices in Turkish arabesk music in the eighties. The man she married beat her for years. In 1982 he threw acid in her face while she was on stage and she lost an eye. She kept returning to the stage. In 1989 the same man killed her. The most important thing the film does is refuse to tell this as a tragic romance. He is not a jealous lover; the film shows him as exactly what he was. The music is built into the narrative. Bergen's songs were listened to at the time as words that accepted suffering, and the film plays the same songs while you know what they were describing. Farah Zeynep Abdullah sang the songs herself. It was directed by Mehmet Binay and Caner Alper. The box office is part of the story too. It drew over 5.3 million admissions in Turkey and became the highest grossing domestic film of 2022, taking more than 160 million lira at home. It opened across eight Middle Eastern markets and became the most successful Turkish film in the region. It was also the first Turkish film ever released in Saudi Arabia. Bergen is now one of the symbolic names in the conversation about violence against women in Turkey, and that is exactly where the argument went when the film opened. It runs 145 minutes. Good for: music biographies, Turkish cinema, and true stories. Less good for: domestic violence is shown directly, along with an acid attack and a murder. It is genuinely hard to watch.