Film telling of struggle between two languages gai

One of the most loved films at the Golden Boll International Film Festival in Adana recently was "İki Dil Bir Bavul" (On the Way to School). The film will continue being talked about long after it has screened at cinemas because it confronts on ongoing problem in Turkey.

The film starts with a young teacher starting his first year of teaching in an eastern village of Turkey. Yet the teacher finds himself in a small, under populated area where no one speaks Turkish, only Kurdish. His astonishment grows when he discovers that he has no water in his small apartment adjacent to the one-classroom school.

The film won two awards at the festival: the Cinema Critics Association, or SİYAD, Best Film Award and the Yılmaz Güney Award. The directors of the film have shot many documentaries over the years but "On the Way to School" is their most successful, according to them.

Socio political films

The two down-to-Earth directors, Özgür Doğan and Orhan Eskiköy, who have worked together for more than six years making socio-political films, have also featured at other festivals and won awards. "Although we have many films I think it will be easy for us to make our voice heard after the Golden Boll International Film Festival," Doğan said.

He even went through the same phases as the students in the film. The idea for the film came when they were editing a film on hunger strikes in 2003 and a friend who was a teacher in Bingöl came to visit them. He told them about the tough situation in Bingöl where he was appointed to teach.

Talking about the difficulties in communication, he told them about when he once asked for gas for the stove to warm the classroom and instead they brought him a pair of pliers. After they heard another short anecdote they decided to hold onto the story. "My memory is not that strong about my childhood so we asked my cousin," Doğan said. As his cousin told them stories, good and bad, they agreed to travel to eastern Turkey to make a movie.

The directors, who are both civil servants, started shooting the film after a five-year wait.

"We were not able to find funding and we had other projects, that’s why it came a bit late," Doğan said. After they applied to GreenHouse Films for funding, a project to develop Mediterranean countries’ films, they were able to find the right contacts for support. Starting in September 2007, they filmed until June 2008. In those nine months there were 70 days of filming. All the people in the film are real-life characters. Doğan and Eskiköy traveled to Urfa and Mardin first to find a teacher who was teaching kids who could hardly speak Turkish. But people advised them to go to Şanlıurfa.

"Each appointed teacher stops by the teacher’s lodge so we decided to go there to look for a teacher to convince to star in our film," Doğan said. After they had talked to nearly 40 teachers in Siverek’s Demirci village, a young man was waiting in the hall of the teacher’s lodge sitting with his head in his hands and looking despondent. The moment they saw him in that situation they knew he was the teacher they were looking for. They propositioned him to take part in their film and he agreed. "We also went to the village to ask for permission from the villagers, they said OK," Doğan said.

Emre Doğan, the young and confused teacher, was a person who could relax in front of the cameras and he was more idealistic than the other nominees.

The directors did not stay in Emre’s small house all the time; they had a harder time with the weather conditions compared to Emre. They mostly stayed in the center of the village. They traveled to Siverek eight times and they were struck sick on each trip. Once they had to go back to Ankara for a full recovery. But when asked, they said they really enjoyed making the film.

The directors had 70 hours of footage. They placed their cameras in specific parts of the classroom for the indoor shots and sometimes waited for a moment to come. "We choose four prominent characters and built up the story mostly around them. The parents of the students sometimes joked around with Emre saying we were also learning a second language, meaning Kurdish," Doğan said. Even though Emre became a little withdrawn in the village, still the children and parents admired him. Some of the parents took their kids and registered them in a bigger primary school in Ziverek, in order to continue their education.

According to the directors they were lucky because the school in the film was opened in 1974 and only one of the students continued into high school education. "They either became shepherds or seasonal employees," Doğan said.

When asked how the children behaved when they saw the cameras, Doğan said they didn’t even know what a camera was. "We know what it is, that’s why the first moment we see it we start acting, but they are not aware of what’s going on there."

Emre had to complete three years of compulsory service. He has already lived for two years in Demirci but he has applied for military service for this August, Doğan said.

There have been moments Emre has had difficulties. He did not know that people in some parts of the country did not speak Turkish. He struggled to teach a new language to the children instead of teaching classes.

Screening at festivals

The film premiered at this year’s Istanbul International Film Festival, was screened in Diyarbakır and was later screened at the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival.

"The people in Diyarbakır showed a great interest in the film. Everyone who has seen the film in Diyarbakır has been through the same thing as those students," Doğan said. He said in Amsterdam people liked it a lot, too. "We have not heard a single criticism."

They filmed the documentary from a neutral vantage, without giving any credit to people who might say the Kurds are terrorists or that teachers are fascists, Doğan said.

The duo spent 43,000 euros shooting the film but the whole budget for "On the Way to School" was 210,000 euros. They are now in debt but this hasn’t stopped them making films. They are eager to bring attention to issues that have not been or cannot be talked about in Turkey.