A Piece of Work

The arrival of a solitary stranger to a remote area in the Turkish highlands slowly upsets the unspoken social structure of the local community, as there is more to this man than his modest appearance might disclose at first sight. As strange events begin to unfold, the locals become increasingly suspicious to the outsider. Operating within a cinematic fiction of its own enigmatic design, ‘A Vacation’ immerses us in a specific yet elusive world where the silent and misty landscapes turn into the site of an equally silent violence and repression. With its evocative imagery and dark-scented ambience, Eroglu’s elliptic narrative offers an analysis of the illusion of freedom and the mechanics of repression at a time when these sort of reflections can be applied all too well to what is happening in the world around us.

Mutiny: Some caregivers party in a New Year’s Eve nursing home. Boarding: A Congolese family living in Germany is visited by a pretend social worker. Adrift: A man crushed by his community wanders in the medieval German countryside. Spanning three interlinked but stylistically distinct films, the triptych navigates the metaphoric and literal topographies of shipwreck as both rupture and reckoning, building a suggestive meditation on exile, identity, and the fractured condition of modern belonging.