Speak of Turkish cinema today and three names inevitably come to the fore: Fatih Akin, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Semih Kaplanoglu. And of this triumvirate of festival-circuit regulars, the first two have been the more prominent: Akin - born, bred and still based in Hamburg - has made major headlines with his in-your-face exploration about Turkish-German cultural politics with films such as Head On and The Edge of Heaven, while Ceylan is a darling on the French Riveira, having brought four of his slow-burning, contemplative films to the Cannes Film Festival and serving on the festival jury last year. His films won awards, among them a Jury Prize and a best director title.
Compared to them, Kaplanoglu has had a much lower profile - to the extent that even seasoned critics admitted being taken aback when the 47-year-old's latest film, Honey, emerged victorious at this year's Berlin Film Festival by winning the Golden Bear prize. He beat off competition - admittedly of varying quality - from former laureates such as Roman Polanski, Wang Quanan, Jasmila Zbanic and Michael Winterbottom.
Kaplanoglu's emergence has been as slow-burning and steady as his films, which are well known for being measured and introspective. Some of Honey's visual wonders, for example, are the long takes that portray the boy protagonist roaming forests to find his disappeared father. The director dubs his own aesthetic 'spiritual realism', referring to how his stories are laden with awe-inspiring imagery and symbolism that, he writes in his notes for Honey, allows for the 'discovering, even defining [of] one's self through the mirror of that film'.
Emerging from that ambition are intensive studies that 'peel down the character slowly and reach his core' - a process that underlines his last three films, which make up what he calls the Yusuf Trilogy. The triptych tells the story of the titular poet but in reverse: Egg, which was screened at the Directors' Fortnight showcase in Cannes in 2007, revolves around a 40-year-old poet's return to his home village to mourn his deceased mother. Milk, an entry at the Venice Film Festival in 2008, sees Yusuf as a teenager torn between pursuing his literary dreams in the city and staying at home to work in his mother's dairy. Finally, Honey introduces Yusuf as a schoolboy traumatised by his father's disappearance and the loss of his speech.
While the individual films work well as stand-alone pieces, the magic of the trilogy partly lies in how a viewer can discern the reasons of the adult Yusuf's ennui by venturing back in time.
His wariness of returning to the countryside (as shown in Egg) can be explained by the experiences he had to deal with while trying to escape from his roots (as shown in Milk). His preference for the inward-looking profession of writing can be traced to his inability to get into military service (Milk) and the scarring experience of being laughed at for a stutter (Honey) he had while a child.
