Salvation

A film set in rural Turkey. There are two tribes. The Hazeran have held the land for years. They sow it, graze it, and live there. The Bezari were driven out years ago. Now they are coming back. The villages are theirs. From there the film is a story about land. Both sides want the same place. The state is in between. The papers on one side, the facts on the ground on the other. The first days pass quietly. Greetings are exchanged, there is talk, and a settlement is sought. Then small incidents begin. An animal, a fence, a watercourse. Each incident is larger than the last. The narrative accumulates them slowly. Nobody makes a decision outright. Everyone waits for the other's next move. What the narrative is interested in is not a fight but fear: its idea is that neither side knows what the other will do, and that not knowing produces the violence by itself. The hierarchy inside the tribes is in the narrative too. Those who decide and those who pay are not the same people. The young men move to the front. The old talk behind them. The women are kept outside the arrangement and the narrative opens that as a line. Emin Alper's method is evident. Long takes, wide landscape, little music, and a tension that rises slowly. He had worked the same subject before; the provinces, authority and neighbours. The images are hard. Dry earth, stone, treeless hills and dust. The violence is sudden and shown sparingly. The ending offers no resolution. The production is a joint work of six countries: Turkey, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Sweden and Saudi Arabia. The film screened in the main competition at the Berlin Film Festival on 15 February 2026 and won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. Caner Cindoruk, Berkay Ateş, Feyyaz Duman and Naz Göktan are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes the festival vein of Turkish cinema and slowly rising tension. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; the narrative goes a long way without incident and the conflict comes very late.