Notes on Adieu Tortue (Bye bye Turtle), by Selin Öksüzoḡlu, France: 2024-Berlin Filmfestival IV. -Berlinale Shorts program 1

I had no idea that this film will be still present in my memory a few weeks after the press screening. The wonder of a film is sometimes when it captivates you from the very first minute. The mountain landscape with its rare signs of human settlement sometimes vanishes almost entirely into the fog. This landscape is impressing and absorbing and sometimes it seems it will suck us completely into its world. A little girl who just lost her mother meets an adult woman. They walk together for a while. The little girl and the woman walk through this strange and fascinating world like two lonely and homeless souls. The woman left her father years ago. The little girl reminds me in the little Ana in Victor Erice´s masterpiece El espiritu de la Colmena (The Ghost in the Beehive). Each glance of her is an unspoken question.

 Sometimes the protagonists vanish in this foggy landsape and with them the traces of their individuality. There is a lostness in space, sometimes like in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. I remember there is a small pantomime scene between the two different characters. They try to assert their presence in this landscape which is always in danger to vanishes ino the fog. Is this the excellent landscape photography or the presence of the landscape itself which gives the film a strange and almost dreamlike quality? The encounter of the girl and the woman is as well an encounter of two stories and two stages of a human life. They are crossing each other, mirroring each other and finally they depart in different directions. Their stories might only be implied but nevertheless in our imagination they are perceptible beyond the limited time of 25 minutes and its masterful framed images. Each of the protagonists is a female Odysseus and the film is partly as well a Road Movie. The film offers both: a meditation about human life in an seemingly endless landscape of mountains and fog but one can also enjoy it as a mesmerizing cinematic poem. Near the end a little truck picks them up. And old woman sings a song. As simple this moment is, it transported me for a moment into a paradise of cinema. The whole film becomes finally a song. 

What we see might be only 25 minutes long and soon after the film is finished when it begins its second life in our memory, there remains a strange sense for infinity. The 25 minutes we have seen seem to extend themselves. Selin Öksüzoḡlu offers in her short film a powerful demonstration of the beauty of cinema. And it is a film which enfolds its visual beauty only on the big screen. And as it is the last Berlinale where I will regularly review films, I am happy to accept this little gem Adieu Tortue as a nice farewell gift.

Rüdiger Tomczak