For the students at a remote boarding school for Kurdish boys, survival is a matter of course, particularly during the frigid depths of winter. The meals are meager, the heating doesn’t work, and even the principal’s car won’t start. Even if it did, he can’t afford snow tires, rendering his vehicle useless in the thick blanket of snow that covers the Eastern Anatolian mountains. All one can do is endure, and fifth-grader Yusuf (Samet Yildiz) has learned that keeping a low profile will spare him the exacting punishments the teachers dole out on his more rambunctious classmates. But when he discovers his best friend Memo (Nurullah Alaca) gravely ill one morning, Yusuf is forced to make himself visible to ensure that Memo is cared for. What unfolds in “Brother’s Keeper,” the latest, very carefully composed feature from Turkish director Ferit Karahan, is a tough lesson for Yusuf about the ruthless inertia of bureaucracy, which can feel far chillier than the temperatures outside.
Set over the course of a single day, Karahan’s film splits its time between unpacking the mystery behind Memo’s sickness and detailing the shell game of blame between the school’s teachers and administration. What has led to Memo lying unconscious in the unstaffed, barely stocked sickroom seems obvious: the previous evening he was punished to take his weekly bath using only cold water, after being caught bickering with others. However, as more strange details emerge, the teachers start unraveling their own half-baked investigation, an exercise in finger-pointing as they try to determine where Memo had been, who he had been with, and who should be at fault for him now lying pale and unresponsive. With heavy snow falling, the school’s only working vehicle away in the nearest village on an unplanned trip, roads difficult to pass, and with ambulances unavailable for an immediate response, everyone tries to snare a net around the truth as they wait for conditions to improve.
Cinematographer Türksoy Gölebeyi’s intimate, handheld camera work and boxy aspect ratio keeps us almost exclusively at Yusuf’s side in what becomes a small odyssey through the school’s corridors and classrooms. With a quiet and desperate determination, Yusuf navigates a system that’s so fragile and underequipped that one sick boy and some bad weather can nearly topple it over. The overworked staff can only make time for the loudest students; frequently, Yusuf’s attempts to get someone’s attention are thwarted by a student misbehaving. When he finally manages to get teachers to pay mind to Memo, perhaps the greatest revelation for the young man is that those tasked with raising these boys to be “valuable citizens to this country and this nation” appear to be almost as helpless in this situation as he is.
Working with co-writer Gülistan Acet, Ferit Karahan has brought his own boarding school experiences to the story, and the palpable frustration he felt in those years is clearly brought to bear. However, “Brother’s Keeper” never boils over into a more searing indictment at the hypocrisies and cruelties that it so effectively outlines. This is partially due to a couple of running jokes, that perhaps serve as a metaphorical illustration of administrative incompetence, but manage to blunt the film’s dramatic impact. One of them involves anyone who enters the sickroom, located in a small building outside the school, wildly slipping and nearly falling every single time their snowy boots hit the sleek tile floor. The other sees various officials reduced to absurdly standing on a chair to get a decent cellphone signal as they try to organize some kind of transportation to take Memo to the hospital. Whenever it feels like the drama needs to be ratcheting up the tension, these moments temporarily deflate the proceedings. But the affecting weight of the story is always reoriented thanks to Samet Yildiz, a non-professional actor from which Ferit Karahan manages to evoke a deeply sensitive performance that lays bare from the first frame the unspoken burdens Yusuf carries on his shoulders.
While the specifics of “Brother’s Keeper” speak directly to Ferit Karahan’s own history, and the state of these kinds of schools in Turkey, it’s easy enough to draw parallels that the pandemic has exposed around the world. It would seem that many in positions of power are ready to abandon their responsibility when it comes time to answer for it. One doesn’t have to look far to find politicians exasperatingly trying to shift focus from the catastrophic institutional failures that have led to thousands of deaths, toward an easy scapegoat. The film’s haunting conclusion is a pointed, damning echo between fiction and that reality, and a disarming snapshot of resignation and injustice that lingers like so much fallen snow. [B]
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