Hayat

IFFR regular Zeki Demirkubuz returns to the festival with Hayat, an expansive drama with existentialist undertones set in present day Turkey. After his fiancée Hicran leaves town, breaking off their arranged engagement without explanation, Riza becomes increasingly despondent and decides to travel to Istanbul to look for her, a woman he barely knows but whose image consumes his entire being.

Hayat, however, is far from an ode to Riza’s quest. Through Hicran’s relationships to the men in her life, the film sharply anthologises the many shades of the wounded male psyche: from vengeful to petulant, from entitled to self-destructive. Despite the men’s insecure, tortured projections, Hicran remains herself, dignified and inscrutable, abandoning herself to what destiny has in store for her.

Combining a keen attention to the minutiae of everyday living with ambitious leaps in time, Hayat foregrounds the strange and sudden turns that life can take. Novelistic in scope, but eminently cinematic in rhythm, the film proceeds at a brisk pace, nevertheless creating ample space for the drama to blossom organically. A work that immerses viewers in a particular world, yet offers them a distance from which to contemplate it.

– Srikanth Srinivasan