Available in home video since February 2007,
Yilmaz Arslans 2005 Fratricide is a
unrelentingly grim and pessimistic study of
feuding Kurd and Turkish youth in the streets of
some unnamed German city. Despite an ostensibly
political theme, it is much more about more
eternal themes such as the need for absolution
and intimacy in a heartless world. Its most
obvious antecedents are the Brazilian film
Pixote and Buñuels Los Olvidados. In all of
these films, feral youth bind with each other in
a largely futile effort to remain human.
In the opening scene of Fratricide, we find
ourselves in the desolate and remote hillsides of
Eastern Anatolia. A mailman has come to deliver a
letter to Azad, a Kurdish teenager. His brother
Semo, a pimp living in Germany, has sent him
money to escape the desperate poverty that makes
life impossible for an oppressed people. When the
mailman asks where Azad may be found, an old
woman tells him to drive until he sees a fig
tree. Then he must take a right and look for the
third yew tree. There Azad will be found.
When we see Azad again, he is living in a hostel
for refugee youth. The counselors have brought in
an eleven year Kurdish boy named Ibrahim
(nicknamed Ibo) to share the room with him. In a
flashback, we learn that Ibos parents have been
killed by the Turkish army. The two youth,
starved for family ties and homesick, bond to
each other immediately. Azad, who scrapes out a
living as a barber in the mens room of a
Kurdish-owned restaurant, makes Ibo his
assistanthis job is to hold up a mirror.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/fratricide/
