Waiting for the Clouds

Yeşim Ustaoğlu's film is adapted from Georgios Andreadis's novel Tamama and is set in Tirebolu, on the Turkish Black Sea coast, in 1975. Ayşe grows more silent after the death of Selma, with whom she had lived for many years, and speaks to almost nobody in the village except Mehmet, a boy of ten. The reason for that silence is something she has kept hidden for decades: Ayşe is really Eleni, the daughter of one of the Greek families of the Black Sea, and she has concealed her identity all her adult life. In the end she travels to Thessaloniki to look for the brother she was separated from. The documented frame is this: during the First World War part of the Greek population of the Black Sea was deported inland, and in 1923 a population exchange followed under the Lausanne convention. What those events should be called remains disputed between Turkey and Greece. The film does not enter that dispute; it is about one woman unable to say her own name.