Almost Entirely a Slight Disaster

  • 88'
  • Turkey
  • 2023

Ayşe, Ali, Mehmet and Zeynep are middle-class millennials struggling to make ends meet in Istanbul. Either still living with their parents or hardly getting by without help from their families, they are all beset by similar woes: money crunch, joblessness, social isolation. In view of the world’s horrors that Zeynep enumerates in her diary entries, these are minor problems, ‘slight disasters’, but they are all-consuming, at least to the extent of making them cry in the still of the night.

However, Umut Subasi’s first feature, Almost Entirely a Slight Disaster, is not a melodrama. With an appealingly light touch, it diagnoses the malaise of a generation that has run up against a dead end, one whose future prospects are indistinguishable from a game of chance. This is a world where astrology, the lottery and online personality tests compete with visa and job applications as life-shaping elements.

Fittingly, the film is structured around chance and coincidence, with its handful of characters encountering each other in every permutation, as though there were no world outside this small social bubble. With self-aware, frontal framing that pins characters to their surroundings and a counterintuitive musical score that turns pathos into humour, Subasi offers a social-media movie without social media, one whose characters are united in their double lives and frustrated desires.

 

Srikanth Srinivasan

  • 88'
  • Turkey
  • 2023
Director
Umut Subasi
Premiere
World premiere
Country of production
Turkey
Year
2023
Festival Edition
IFFR 2023
Length
88'
Medium
DCP
Original title
Sanki her şey biraz felaket
Languages
Turkish, English
Producer
Cemre Erül
Production Company
Yunik Film
Sales
MPM Premium
Screenplay
Umut Subasi
Cinematography
Mert Özercan
Editor
Umut Subasi
Cast
Melis Sevinç, Melisa Bostancıoğlu, İbrahim Arıcı, Mert Can Sevimli
Director
Umut Subasi
Premiere
World premiere
Country of production
Turkey
Year
2023
Festival Edition
IFFR 2023
Length
88'
Medium
DCP
Original title
Sanki her şey biraz felaket
Languages
Turkish, English
Producer
Cemre Erül
Production Company
Yunik Film
Sales
MPM Premium
Screenplay
Umut Subasi
Cinematography
Mert Özercan
Editor
Umut Subasi
Cast
Melis Sevinç, Melisa Bostancıoğlu, İbrahim Arıcı, Mert Can Sevimli