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“Djinn Wedding” (“Cinlerin Düğünü”), written and directed by Ferit Karahan (“Brother’s Keeper,” “The Fall From Heaven”), will have its world premiere at Toronto as part of the TIFF Platform competition. This is Karahan’s
follow-up feature to “Brother’s Keeper,” which won the Berlin Film Festival’s Fipresci Award in the Panorama section.
A magic realism story about family, history and Anatolian folk tales, the film follows four siblings across three periods of time as their dark secrets and traumas begin to unravel during a family wedding. It deals with the universal themes of loss, guilt and mourning.
The film stars Demit Özdemir, Kaan Yildirim, İlhan Şen, Sarp Bozkurt, Heli̇n Kandemi̇r and Evliya Aykan. It is produced by Ferit Karahan Film, Royal Pictures, Maya Films and Arya Yapim. Luxbox is handling international sales.
Variety spoke with director Ferit Karahan ahead of its world premiere in Toronto.
Can you tell me about the djinn and what they symbolize in Anatolian folklore?
Ferit Karahan: In Anatolian culture specifically, but also more broadly across Islamic cultures, djinn are invisible beings who share the same world as humans. Stories about them are often intertwined with the night, abandoned places, thresholds, weddings and death. I grew up in a region where these stories were still very much alive. It was part of everyday life for people to make sense of things they couldn’t explain through djinn, dreams or legends.
The reality we live with in the Middle East today can be so harsh, and at times so irrational, that even when I try to explain it to my own child, I find myself needing elements of the surreal. I don’t use them to soften reality or escape from it. On the contrary, I use them to make that reality tellable and bearable. Perhaps this is where my relationship with magical realism begins. Djinn, dreams, legends and invisible things are not alternatives to reality for me; they are another layer of it.
What were some of the themes you wanted to address in the film?
Karahan: Before I began making the film, there was a question that kept circling in my mind: “Can a person who refuses to acknowledge their own darkness ever truly change their fate?” I don’t think the most dangerous thing about human beings is that we have dark impulses. Greed, jealousy, anger or the desire for power can exist in all of us. The real danger is denying that they exist. This is what interests me in Jung’s concept of the “shadow:” we don’t destroy what we refuse to see in ourselves; we simply leave it in the dark.
What are your thoughts on present-day Turkey and its political landscape?
Karahan: I think we are living in an atmosphere of fear. People don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or even what might happen to them personally. And this fear is not unique to Turkey; it is increasingly spreading across the region, and even across the world. The war between Iran and the U.S. and the conflicts throughout the region, affect all of us. The resurgence of the far right in Europe inevitably makes me think of the 1920s and 1930s. In many parts of the world, fear is once again being used as a political instrument and people are once again being governed through fear.
The political and economic conditions in Turkey today affect towns like the one depicted in the film. The consequences of the economic crisis, migration, unemployment and diminishing access to education can sometimes be felt even more severely in smaller towns than in major cities. That is why I don’t see the town in the film as some folkloric world left behind in the past. On the contrary, to me it is very much a place of the present.
Is there a connection between this film and “Brother’s Keeper?”
Karahan: In “Brother’s Keeper,” the source of oppression was more visible: the school, authority, the system created by adults. In “Djinn Wedding,” that oppression is no longer outside the characters. It has seeped into the family, into memory, even into the ways people love one another.
“Djinn Wedding” is also a much more autobiographical film for me. “Brother’s Keeper” grew out of a real incident from my childhood, but “Djinn Wedding” comes from a much broader and more personal memory. Family, home, siblings, loss, silence, the stories that are told and the ones that are never told, all of these are much more directly connected to my own past.
There is a scene in the film where the mother is placed inside a large cauldron filled with hot water. That image actually comes from my childhood. When I was about nine years old, I saw the brother of a neighbor who had cancer being placed in a large cauldron of hot water to ease his pain. While I was writing the script, it suddenly came back to me. I suppose cinema has this strange relationship with memory: sometimes an image you have carried for years without knowing why finds its place in a story much later.
