On Board

The four-man crew of a sand boat working the Bosphorus gets into a fight at the docks one night and comes back to the boat with an abducted woman. She is Russian and speaks no Turkish. The captain thinks about taking her back, the crew think about other things, and the boat keeps circling the strait without putting anyone ashore. The film is not interested in crime. It is interested in the order men build in a closed space: the boat runs like a state, the captain's authority is challenged, and the woman is turned from a person into a question. The film shows this without endorsing it and without softening it anywhere. The form is tight and dark: almost entirely aboard, shot at night, handheld, with heavily profane dialogue. The lights of the Bosphorus are always distant and out of reach. Serdar Akar directed and wrote it with Önder Çakar. It won Best Director, Best Actor and Best Editing at the Golden Orange festival in 1998. It counts as the first film of Yeni Sinemacılar, founded by Akar, Çakar and Sevil Demirci, and as one of the works that began the revival of Turkish cinema in the late nineties. Erkan Can plays the captain. Who it is for: viewers who like late-nineties Turkish cinema and single-location drama. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take sexual violence and relentless humiliation. The film shows them at length and never gives the audience relief.