The Butterfly's Dream

A film set in Zonguldak. The year is 1941. The city is built on coal; the mines are working, the war is going on outside, and the state enlists every man either for the front or for the pit. Rüştü and Muzaffer are poets. Young, without money, and both tubercular. They send what they write to magazines in Istanbul and wait for an answer. Their teacher takes them up. A poet himself, he reads them, corrects them and guides them. Then a rivalry enters: both begin writing poems to the same girl, Suzan. From there the film runs three things together: illness, poverty and the wish to write. A sanatorium, compulsory labour, a pit accident and replies from the magazine. What the narrative is interested in is not love but time: the two young men know they have very little of it, and the film never hides that. The source is real. Rüştü Onur and Muzaffer Tayyip Uslu lived, were from Zonguldak, and both died very young of tuberculosis; their poems were published afterwards. Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, Mert Fırat, Belçim Bilgin and Farah Zeynep Abdullah are in the cast. The director plays the teacher himself. Yılmaz Erdoğan wrote and directed. It was one of the most expensive Turkish films of its time and reached a wide audience. Who it is for: anyone who likes period films and stories about literature. Who it is not for: anyone looking for restraint; the film keeps its emotional cues high and it is long.