Dot

Ahmet is a man cornered by debt who once wanted to be a calligrapher. He ends up in the middle of the hunt for a stolen manuscript, and the trail of the crime runs out to the Salt Lake. The film asks who is responsible for a crime not in a straight line but in loops that run backwards and forwards. The subject is not crime but the idea of the dot in calligraphy. In that art the dot is both the unit of measure and the place where every letter begins, and the film carries the same idea into narrative, looking for the moment a life breaks. The form is the real claim here. The roughly seventy-minute film is constructed to read as one unbroken shot, and Dervis Zaim says he took that from the calligraphic technique of writing without lifting the pen. The Salt Lake is used as paper: white, empty, constant in its light, carrying people like spots of ink. The film is the second part of Zaim's cycle on traditional arts; the first took up miniature painting and shadow theatre would follow. The calligrapher Fuat Basar worked on the film. Mehmet Ali Nuroglu, Serhat Kilic and Settar Tanriogen star. Who it is for: viewers after formal experiment and curious about traditional arts carried into cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a fast thriller; the single-take choice slows the storytelling and the performances occasionally buckle under it.