Director : Huseyin Karabey
Winner of the Best New Narrative Filmmaker Award @ Tribeca Film Festival
In March 2003, as American bombs began falling on Baghdad, Turkish actress Ayça Damgaci left her flat in Istanbul and headed for the Iraq border. Behind that cordon was Kurdish actor Hama Ali Khan, the love of Damgaci's life-her moon and stars, her Marlon and her Brando, her everything. Hüsey
in Karabey makes his narrative debut retelling the tale of Damgaci's quixotic road trip to the war zone, with Damgaci playing herself and Khan appearing in the actual video love notes he sent to her during their time apart. My Marlon and Brandois a piece of rough magic,
a film with a soul as light, a heart as heavy, and a will as steely as its heroine's own.
Karabey's experience as a director of documentaries shines through in his devotion to ethnographic detail-he's eager to let the camera stray, vérité-s
tyle, and this helps to bring home Damgaci's growing sense of dislocation. Borders may be porous, but it is still possible to feel a stranger in a strange land. Really, though, the movie is Damgaci's-a brave, tender, and freque
ntly very funny tribute to her love for Khan. Read aloud, her letters to him make for something wonderful and new in the history of lovers beseeching. Communicating in English, their shared tongue, Damgaci's clumsy grasp of the language elevat
es into rhetoric all the more moving for being flawed. Likewise, through Khan's ham-fistedly hilarious videos, you miss him on Dagmaci's behalf. Politics may turn this comedy about unlikely lovers into a tragedy, but even in its fleeting ungain
liness, My Marlon and Brando is a fitting homage to Damgaci and Khan, two matched souls that no impassable border could ever tear asunder.
Hüseyin Karabey (born 1970, Istanbul, Turkey) Karabey studied economics first, but decided later on to attend film courses at the School of Fine Arts at the Marmara University. He has taught short film making in many different organizations and universities. His films Boran and long documentary Silent Death have brought him several awards.
Filmography
Silent Death (2001), Gitmek: My Marlon and Brando (2008)
Rating : 7.8/10
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