Ararat

Zeynep has caused a traffic accident in Berlin. To escape the consequences, she flees to her parents’ home in rural eastern Turkey. The atmosphere in this remote house at the foot of Mount Ararat is one of speechlessness and cold-hearted anger: each family member harbours personal and professional secrets that also affect the others. It appears that there is as much simmering below the surface within this family as there is deep beneath the snow-covered, dormant volcano that looms like a portent against the night sky. Zeynep’s self-destructive, sexually assertive behaviour causes the entrenched conflicts and tissue of lies that exist between mother, father, daughter and the people around them to burst open, hurling repressed feelings to the surface like magma.
In his feature film debut, director Engin Kundağ portrays relationships that are painfully dysfunctional on both private and social levels. In his assuredly composed, impressively dark tableaux, the barren landscape is mirrored in the sparse communication – and vice versa.