Before Your Eyes

One of the biggest problems with political issue movies is that of slant and motivation, seeing as the purpose is often to recruit and manipulate the audience into a perspective. It's not by fault of the director, whose limited consciousness is similar to that of a populous that remains unrewarded for acknowledging uniqueness and excess signifiers. But it still limits appreciation to those already converted or the exceedingly gullible. In all fairness, Miraz Bezar's treatise on the Kurdish/Turkish struggle is a socially responsible and upwardly motivated work that professes values that contradict violence. It follows young siblings Gulistan (Senay Orak) and Firat (Muhammed Al) through the daily struggles following the murder of their parents by radical secret state security agents. Initially selling the contents of their home to buy food, they're later unable to afford medicine for their infant sibling, turning to the streets and, eventually, crime to survive. The observations that male survival relies on petty crime and exploitation while females are reduced to subjugation and objectification are proof enough of a keen eye. But this is merely an aside to the greater lesson, which comes from a recorded story and allegory that the children keep of their mother talking of tying a bell to a wolf to warn potential victims rather than slaughtering it to resolve their problems. Before Your Eyes gravitates from a tale of street life to that of appropriate revenge when Gulistan happens upon the man that killed her parents while working. Indeed, the slant is that of victimization, which is exacerbated by the sheer innocence and inherent sweetness of our ten-year-old protagonist, but the focus is less on broad politics than the importance of responding to anger productively. It is this focus that makes this low-key Turkish drama far more profound than most political issue movies, favouring bettering universalities over dry lecturing, despite its obvious underlying purpose. Also included with the DVD is the short film It's My Turn, wherein a group of boys play a game to decide who will get to go to the movies that day, seeing as they can't afford to go together. Again, this is a story of handling conflict maturely, only here the metaphor is simpler.