Having left behind a failed career and marriage, Selim returns to Izmir. Unfortunately, his arrival, filled with plans for the future, wanderings and meetings with schoolmates, happens at a time when residents of Izmir start leaving the City. The reason for their escape is a terrible smell caused by a damaged tanker. Only Selim will dismiss the protective mask, looking at reality as if it were his first time. Although the hero’s rise to enlightenment moves in the direction of Fellini’s paradise which resembles a secular commune, it becomes the metaphor of all our garbage dumps and floating LNG terminals. Because for every end there is a beginning. Yeksan’s piece begins with the end. However, Turkey’s image today – with its authoritarian government, migrations and oil routes – is at the same time our anesthetized reality, which is unable to interpret the signs of (ecological) tragedy that is happening here and now. Alienation, confusion and apathy – these are the inner states that accompany Selim. Perhaps the future lies in a group of rebellious young men. By playing the binary discourse of metaphors and reality, existential and political, individual and collective, Yeksan tries to prove an idea that is at the same time abstract and concrete, a dream and a starting point.
Translation: Saša Vidaković
Emre Yeksan was born in 1981. He graduated in film studies from Istanbul’s Mimar Sinan University and La Sorbonne, University of Paris. He works as a producer. In 2008 he returned from Paris to Istanbul, where he started developing his own projects. The Gulf is his first work.
