Journey to the Sun

Mehmet is a young man who has come to Istanbul from Tire; he takes a job with the municipality looking for leaks in the water mains. In the same city he meets Berzan, who has come from the other end of the country, and the two become friends. After a chain of events Mehmet is taken into custody, beaten, and comes out marked. Nobody looks at him the way they did before. Yeşim Ustaoğlu's film won the Blue Angel award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999; it opened in Turkey a year later, in March 2000. The telling does not set out a political thesis; it is about the friendship between two young men and about Mehmet's identity being decided for him regardless of what he is. His attachment to Berzan finally takes him east, towards his friend's village.