Serhat Karaaslan’s Dondurma at Ajyal Youth Film Festival
sets the bar high for Qatar-Turkey collaboration in 2015
By Anand Holla
Turkish filmmaker Serhat Karaaslan’s Dondurma (Ice Cream) is exactly the kind of delightful slice-of-life short film that one would expect to be surprised with at the ongoing second edition of Ajyal Youth Film Festival.
As the festival celebrated the culmination of Qatar-Brazil 2014 Year of Culture and the start of the 2015 Qatar-Turkey Year of Culture, acclaimed Brazilian animated film The Boy and the World and Turkish short Dondurma wowed the audience.
Having been screened at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year, the 16-minute-long Dondurma has been fetching considerable praise in the festival circuit. Karaaslan’s previous shorts Bicycle (2010) and Musa (2012), too, were received well.
If this first offering of the new Qatar-Turkey collaboration is any indication of what awaits us all through 2015, then we can safely set our hopes high.
Set in a picturesque, remote village in Turkey, the story follows Rojhat (Rojhat Deli), a bratty but determined 11-year-old who wouldn’t stop at anything to get his ice cream — a phase most of us may identify with.
On a muggy summer noon, the only thing that can stop a throng of kids from playing football seems to be the resounding whirr of a motorbike from a distance. That, of course, is of the ice cream seller. Screaming, running, the kids chase his bike and swarm him when he halts.
However, Rojhat’s insubordination towards his mother (Ebru Ojen Sahin) complicates his ice cream excursion. Not only does he run away from helping her in giving bath to his infant sibling, but he also decides to “steal” two eggs from their chicken shed so as to barter them for a cone full of lip-smacking vanilla.
In fact, as the children can’t spare any money, they barter anything from plastic to iron pipes for a melting shot of sugar rush.
Things don’t go too well for Rojhat when he trips and cracks the eggs. Crying, he returns home to an angry mother who gets further irritated with his bad behaviour. He is desperate for ice cream but doesn’t know the way out. When she hurls a slipper at him and misses him, he knows he has found his barter currency — the footwear itself.
As Rojhat picks it up and runs through vast stretches of land, we still don’t know if he can succeed. Being the endearing narrative that it is, it’s anybody’s guess whether Rojhat gets his ice cream. What makes Karaaslan’s short interesting though is his intimate, young-spirited treatment of a simple story.
Sükrü Özçelik’s eye-soothing cinematography captures the kids’ frenzied chase for the goodies with as much love as it does the expansive landscape, while Karaaslan’s direction has the ability to draw out and present the little pleasures and peculiarities of daily rural life in an easy, heart-tugging manner.
Much like the ice cream that the kids go crazy after, Dondurma is a sweet piece of filmmaking that is thoroughly enjoyable as long as it lasts.