Document

On the Way to School

  • Orhan Eskiköy, Özgür Do?an /
  • Turkey /
  • 2009 /
  • 81 mins

All the charm and affection of Être et Avoir seen through the eyes of a young Turkish teacher just finding his feet.

Beautifully uncontrived and affecting moments pervade this compassionate and insightful document of a teacher’s first year at a primary school in remote Turkish Kurdistan. Recently graduated Emre Aydin has been appointed by his government to run the one-room school in Sanliurfa, an impoverished village in South East Turkey. He arrives to discover a community with no running water, a somewhat relaxed approach to school attendance and pupils who only speak Kurdish, a language fervently prohibited by the Turkish government. Filmed over one year, this is a charming yet edifying portrait of twentysomething Emre and his class, as they struggle to come to terms with one another’s customs within the context of an ongoing political battle between Turkey and Kurdistan. There are 11 to 15 million Kurdish people living in Turkey, but the Turkish government is determined to marginalise them by making it official policy to actively discourage the use of the Kurdish language. Through their subtle and unobtrusive observation, emerging collaborators Eskiköy and Do?an compellingly translate one of the biggest issues escalating in Turkey today. The static camera shots within the classroom are simple, but key to securing close access to Emre and his student’s situation. By allowing events to unravel before our eyes, the camera is a perfect witness to the children’s innocence and guilelessness (reminiscent of Nicolas Philibert’s Être et Avoir) versus Emre’s slowly fading enthusiasm and increasing frustration, as he simply tries to communicate with them. Outside the classroom, the camera keeps its distance astutely, instilling a sense of place for the children but also expressing the poignant estrangement of their teacher within it – a man who you come to understand is as innocent of the political situation as his students are. In germination for five years and facilitated by a development grant from the Sundance Documentary Fund and a post-production grant from the Dutch Jan Vrijman Fund (IDFA), this film displays a distinct, unmediated style. Perceptively employing simple observation, Eskiköy and Do?an affectionately but discerningly demonstrate how disruptive dictatorial politics affect quotidian life.

2009 Archive

Image from On the Way to School

Comments

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  • #1 Amy Shields / Monday 22 June, 2009 / 13:49 GMT

    Saw this yesterday and was really impressed.

  • #2 Moray Nairn / Monday 22 June, 2009 / 23:44 GMT

    According to the brochure, Turkish documentary On the Way to School has "all the charm of Etre et Avoir..." - a claim perhaps not endorsed by a full house at the Film festival's smallest venue tonight. Orhan Eskikoy's at times clumsy film offers all the ingredients of a fascinating insight into a country still affected by what was the Middle East's biggest civil war less than ten year ago. Newly qualified and green young teacher Emre is sent from his prosperous industrial home city in Turkey's South West to a remote village in Turkish Kurdistan, nestling in the far South East of the nation. Unfortunately, the movie is shown almost completely from Emre's perspective and when it becomes apparent that none of the children in his new school speak Turkish, but instead all converse freely in Kurdish (a language actively subjugated by the Turkish authorities), we are served up with a diet of growing frustration and hopelessness from the increasingly isolated teacher. While this is presumably the starting point for the educational process, as a film this sounds the death knell for Eskikoy. His movie flounders without a clear vision of the message being delivered. It's not clear how we're supposed to react to Emre's inability to communicate with the young Kurds and, for example, when we see him ask a 5 year old boy to sharpen his pencil and is forced to repeat the question around twenty times, growing louder and more annoyed at each repetition, you wonder if this is supposed to be humerous (a la Basil Fawlty trying to speak German) or pitiful, like the refugee that Emre has almost become. Certainly the parallel about the Turkish Government's inability to engage with the ethnic Kurds is not lost on the audience, and is hammered home by uncomfortable scenes where Kurdish children are made to robotically chant the Turkish oath of citizenship, when it is clear that they can barely remember the words, let alone have any concept of their meaning. (Continued in next post)

  • #3 Moray Nairn / Monday 22 June, 2009 / 23:47 GMT

    The Director's meaning is almost as opaque by this point. Are we supposed to assume this is a dig at the antiquated post-Imperial language of a country coming to terms with its new-found constitutional status between the Wars or is it a comment on how values of loyalty, obedience and honour to the Turkish republic are relative concepts to the distant and proudly separatist Kurds?
    For a director who spent a whole year at the school, that there are only a few episodes of footage of Emre trying to teach is revelatory in itself. It's simply a hopeless prospect and as the film progresses we are left more and more often to observe the children amusing themselves with universal games of targeting and throwing, or unstructured snippets of family members helping the children out of their uniforms.
    The film meanders towards a conclusion in which you feel poor Emre must make some sort of cathartic breakthrough in his self-proclaimed goal to teach the kids to read and write in Turkish (let alone speak it...) but even this is denied. Instead the teacher's own growing isolation is painted by his frequent phone calls home and his almost total lack of anything to relate - his emotional experience appears as barren as the plateaus to which he has been exported.
    It's not all bad news however. The film does just about enough to keep you watching, if only in the expectation that things must get better. The harsh continental climate of Kurdistan is ably reflected with loving shots of late autumn sun streaming through dirty windows and illuminating shafts of dust-filled light. The summer corn is scythed during harvest in what may be a slightly artificial attempt to portray the Kurds as stereotyped farmers, and animal husbanders - we do get to see them watching TV earlier, and in the midst of this rural nightmare, Emre clings to his mobile phone. You can take the urbanite out of the city but.....
    (Continued in next post)

  • #4 Moray Nairn / Monday 22 June, 2009 / 23:48 GMT

    Probably the most evocative scenes are during the winter where the horizontal blizzards and scenes burning scant firewood inside the classroom itself remind us that whatever we are led to believe about the Kurds and their political and legal status, the bare facts of the physical situation in which they have to exist transcend some of the heavy handed moral and cultural lessons being laid down. Life is hard there, and whether these children ever learn to tell a watermelon apart from a cow in the Turkish language may be less important than the lessons of survival and how to eke out a living from the stony ground.
    Overall, the film is worth seeing even if only to witness a stranger's experience of an even stranger land, but where as there is plenty of observation, the crucial factor of the finest documentary making - insight - is sadly lacking.
    END

  • #5 Niladri Bose / Wednesday 24 June, 2009 / 11:15 GMT

    Feel sad for the Kurdish people. This film was very educational for me as I don't usually read the newspaper. A subtle introduction to the Kurdish culture.

    Fantastic technique , the director made it look very easy but I would imagine that it is very difficult to film children in a classroom in a non intrusive way.

    Documentary films , in my opinion , should not pontificate on the subject and should be a mere spectator of events. Allowing the audience to makeup thier own minds , to excercise the brain cells. Exactly what chekhov did with storytelling and this film does with a documentary .

    I loved the fact that there was no political commentary about who was right (and who was wrong) , as we don't always know the right answer .
    The directors answer might not be the correct answer anyway.

    Spoonfeeding is not required in meaningful cinema.

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