director of Ships (Ferahfeza) Elif RefiÄŸ Istanbul Film Festival 2012

A boy and a girl from a small harbour, both outcasts unable to find their place in their own families, find comfort in eachother in Ships (Ferahfeza). Elif Refiğ’s promising debut feature tells a touching story in a mistique landscape, so I wanted to know more about her and her work.

You were born and raised in Istanbul and still live here; what made you choose a small harbour for your film?

From the very beginning I wanted to create an atmosphere, a place that doesn’t have any geographical connotations and a non-specific time. Actually those shipyards and harbours are in the outskirts of Istanbul, and they feel like the nineties outside of a city. But we don’t know exactly what city.

The setting plays a big part in Ships, visually; can you tell me about the collaboration with Türksoy Gölebeyi, your cinematographer?

I was very lucky because my cinematographer is a very supportive person. We didn’t have much time to prepare for the film, so we had to solve most of the things on the set when it comes to framing. We had problems because he’s very ambitious about every shot, but in the end of the day we always had a common idea of what was going on.

How did you develop the characters?

I wanted to go beyond gender connotations. The male character carries female characteristics – he is dreamy, believes in mystical things, and the girl is more manly. I believe that any person carries a part of the opposite gender. This is a film about two characters finding eachother and becoming one in a trip, the female characteristics of a man and the male characteristics of a woman come together and form a team. A better team than a very manly man and a very womanly woman.

People can relate to Ali and Eda’s family issues no matter where they come from; did you plan to make a universal film?

I always wanted it to be a timeless and a placeless film, so I thought that the more local and national specificities are excluded, the more universal it becomes. I didn’t specifically plan to make it universal, I just wanted to make it whole.

Before making films, you wrote about them for a magazine. Has your background in film criticism helped you in any way when you became a director?

No, but watching many films definitely helped me, you have to watch many films if you write about them. They are completely different: when you write, you have to be very argumentative and logical and always prove things with social, economical, visual, artistic arguments. When you shoot, of course you have to think about it, but the most important part is your instincts telling you what to do. A film critic has to drop some stuff and go back to the instincts if s/he wants to make a film.

You studied filmmaking abroad, why did you make this choice?

I wanted to make films, so I started to work in the film industry here in Turkey, but I realized that I can’t learn much here. I got a scholarship and I studied here for a year, but it was all theory and I wanted to learn drama, and how to write the dialogue. For the time that you spend, the people you have to deal with and the energy you invest, what you get back is not worth it, and I wanted more.

Ships was in the Meetings on the Bridge program at last year’s Istanbul Film Festival, can you tell me more about how it helped?

Most of the funders and distributors want minimum 1 year to prepare for a project, to understand it and be a part of the writing project, and I was a little bit too late: I wanted to go into pre-production, I only had 6 months left before starting shooting. But if you have an idea and you write a treatment, it’s the perfect place to be: you can get different oppinions from film professionals from allover the world, you can hear yourself pitching the story and if you have weaknesses you then have the time to correct them.

The main character Ali pays a lot of attention to signs and their meanings, what about the making of your film? Were there any signs you got during the shooting?

Nothing went well, we thought it’s a sign we shouldn’t be making the film at all. The weather was always against us, the sun always against us, but I didn’t want to take them seriously as signs because they were all negative.