Away from Home

In 2001, 1.7 million Turkish citizens almost all of them young and educated applied for US citizenship. In the late Eighties, thousands of women from exSoviet countries surged to Turkey looking for work, but hardly found any, other than prostitution. In the early Fifties, some Turkish communist intellectuals fled to the USSR as voluntary exiles or to escape imprisonment. Away From Home looks for an answer to the everlasting question ‘Where is home?’ by combining the tragedies of these three generations for the first time in Turkish cinema. Semih Kaplanoglu brings together one representative of each and puts them in a situation in which they have to struggle emotionally with each other and themselves in order to find out what home means to them. A land, a dream, a beloved person… Money enters as a catalyst.Away From Home isn’t new in its style, but it deals with the issue of emigration in a very sensitive way. The story is true to life. The narrative is smooth and clear. It’s one of the three movies released in Turkey in 2001 which aren’t mainstream. Semih Kaplanoglu deserves to be part of the long expected rise of the new generation in Turkish cinema with his modest first feature.(Alin Tabciyan writes for Milliyet)