A Run for Money

Selim runs a menswear shop inherited from his father in the back streets of Istanbul. In his early forties, he lives in a modest flat with his wife, his small daughter and his own father. The traders around him trust him; he spends knowing how hard money is to earn and has no patience for the small trickery of daily life. One day he finds a bag full of dollars on the seat of a taxi he has got into. It is Reha Erdem's second feature. The film uses the bag not as a device of plot but as a mirror; the question is not only what Selim does with the money but what he becomes in front of it. The price of staying honest in an order where honesty counts as being a fool is the real subject. Taner Birsel plays Selim. The telling is slow and from the inside; the world of Istanbul's small traders at that time has the value of a document now.