The Blue Exile

This ambitious co-production, based on Cevat Sakir's autobiographical novel The Fishermen of Helicarnassus (Mavi Sürgün), describes the author's six-month journey in 1925 from Ankara to exile in the SW fishing port that is now Bodrum, where he was to serve the second half of a sentence for writing about WWI deserters. Kiral uses the epic journey as a poetic meditation on the writer's life, and also on memory, history and the meaning of life. Replete with quotes from Dante and mysterious dark episodes (such as one on a train in which Schygulla's 'Levant Marie' reminds the exile of his first wife), it's an enigmatic confusing drama, but one which often succeeds in triggering 'the unbearable smell of the past'.