Pandora’s Box by Yesim Ustaoglu

Recently awarded Best Film at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Pandora’s Box is a fresh and subtle movie, a real masterpiece.

An old woman, who lives alone in a Turkish village, suddenly disappears. Her children, now adults and living in Istanbul, have to get together to bring her back to the city and take care of her. Their mother is clearly losing her mind, at one point peeing in the middle of the street. The Pandora’s box is opened.

Yesim Ustaoglu allows her characters to naturally bring us towards the conclusion, which is charged with emotional, social and political meanings. More than any other film about Alzheimers, Ustaoglu shows, through one small family, today’s tension in dealing with the elderly : keeping them at home, which is not easy, or putting them in care homes like in the West, which is not acceptable either.

The beautiful framing of the Ulus region, along with an interesting use of sound and silences, creates a very clean style. The director is helped along by talented actors, such as the 90-year-old Belgian actress Tsilla Shelton, who learnt turkish for the film. Oppositions such as modernity/tradition, countryside/city, and older/future generations, are drawn out in a simple yet strong story. The view of contemporary Turkey is pertinent, full of the typical Turkish nostalgia of people thrown into a modernity that doesn’t fullfill them. Usatoglu raises her purpose to something universal. Intelligently, she ends the film by stopping her vertical panning shot before it reaches the sky.

Julien Melebeck