Paper Lives

A film set in Istanbul. Mehmet collects paper. He works out of a depot, gathers waste from the streets and brings it in, and the owner pays by weight. Others stay at the depot too. A group of men who work by day and sleep there at night. Mehmet is ill. He has headaches, faints, and will not see a doctor. One night he finds a child in a rubbish container. Ali is eight; frightened, silent, and unwilling to go to anyone. Mehmet brings him to the depot. From there the film becomes a story of hiding. The child has been reported missing, the police are looking, and all the men work without papers. Going to the police station is out. Everyone has a reason not to. Mehmet decides to look for the boy's family. But what Ali says does not add up and the trail is hard to follow. At the same time Mehmet's own past opens. He was in an institution as a child and what happened there comes back along with the headaches. What the narrative is interested in is not poverty but existing off the record: all its tension comes from nobody officially existing; the men have no papers and the child has no place. The depot is the centre. Bales, a scale, a lorry, bunks and a stove; the setting is built like a home. The tone is softened. The narrative shows the hardness of the street but leans on feeling at the end and the resolution comes too neatly. It was shot in real locations in Istanbul and made for a streaming platform. Çağatay Ulusoy, Emir Ali Doğrul, Ersin Arıcı and Turgut Tunçalp are in the cast. Can Ulkay directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes warm, emotional Turkish drama. Who it is not for: anyone expecting hard realism; the narrative opens the subject but does not press it, and the ending is predictable.