CIRCLE ( BACKSTAGES of DREAM SCENES)
Is it man who directs his destiny or is it destiny who directs man?
“Circle” aims to tell about a system in which hopelessness, submission and courage become existential methods. It aims to describe people who on a daily basis do the irrational and inconceivable to survive, and a system which forces people to do so. “Circle” is the story of people in the characters of Feramuz, Arif and Betul who conjure up interesting solutions to the extraordinary situations and obstacles generated by the turn of the social wheel.
Director and Scriptwriter’s opinion
There are systems that define who we are. Despite all their complexities, mistakes, incomprehensible weirdness, extraordinariness, weaknesses, and illogical aspects, these systems somehow fulfill their functions and render life liveable no matter how hard or easy, and define who we are. Sometimes newspapers serve these weird aspects as black humor, sometimes we exchange them via forward emails to learn from others’ mishap, sometimes we don’t even think to question them and we accept them as regularities of our lives. Some examples of these weirdness: flight of fire escape staircase made out of wood or construction of an Olympic stadium with eighty thousand seats in a small city in a far corner of Anatolia where drastically less population resides or a extravagant train station in a city where no rail tracks has or will ever been laid.
When the system we inhabit generates weird and incomprehensible obstacles and regularities, we tend to strive to adapt to the system instead of trying to change it. We strive to survive by creating weirder and extraordinary solutions. In a way, this attitude is the hope for hopelessness, solution for insoluble. A character of this nature has always come to be worth telling.
Against the backdrop of a slow justice system, unruly work life, and complexity of the social system, the individual is forced to be alert, take risks, and think the unthinkable. Anatolia is a land that produced an idiom to laud people who
have the power to earn life and survive under adverse conditions. It reads as follows “squeezing the juice out of rock”. It has been home to people who “squeeze the juice out of rock” to survive, and to a system who makes them squeeze it. “Circle” is a small experiment to describe this system and its people without alienating, judging, and distancing them.
The seemingly single stories about each character that tell their lives, needs, goals, and methods in fact take us to the picture of a system that makes people think and do the extraordinary. Hopelessness, submission, humbleness, courage, and tenacity have come to comprise the life capital of the majority in this country. “Circle” focuses on these concepts. The weird decisions, situations, and experiences it presents have happened in real life and it is believed that similar situations continue to exist. It is for these reasons I believe that this fictional story which feeds on real, tangible and big structural causality is worth telling.