WAITING ROOM (Bekleme Odasi)

North America Premiere

Festivals and Awards:

Best Director of the Year Award, Istanbul Film Festival, April 24, 2004 

Selected for the Istanbul Film Festival International Competition, 2004

Best Supporting Actress Award (Nurhayat Kavrak), the 40th Golden Orange Film Festival, Antalya, 2003

Scheduled to be screened and compete in many international film festivals in 2004. 

Synopsis:

Can anyone make a voluntary choice to have high values, morality, loneliness, arrogance and conceitedness? Moreover, can these high ranks, given only to heroes as reward of their suffering, become a haven to today's selfish, deceiving, immoral anti-hero?

Ahmet is a film director who wants to make a film about Dostoyevsky’s classic novel ‘Crime and Punishment’. He thinks himself as an arrogant, and faithless man, however, according to people he is an idealist man who lives in accordance with his principles.

Nevertheless, Ahmet  feels unreasonably uninterested towards both his project and his girlfriend Serap. He feels like he is alienated from his own life. He stays at home all day long and lives like a stranger.

Serap thinks that Ahmet’s this devastating mood is because of  another woman. One night, after a long and oppressive inquiry session, Ahmet gets bored and tells her that he is having an affair with another woman and Serap leaves the house.

Meanwhile, Ahmet’s assistant Elif is dealing with the preparation works of the film and trying to find a person who will play Roskolnikof’s role, the leading character of the novel.

However, Ahmet doesn’t like any of the actors that have participated in the audition. Finally, Ahmet decides to give a role to the young thief whom he had caught a while ago while he was trying to break into his house, and released him without reporting to the police. Nevertheless, he has no idea where to find this young man.

The Director's Commentary:

I have tried to tell various stories of tens of people in the five films I've made so far. However, upon completing each film, I came to the realization that making a film itself consists of powerful human drama, doubts, questions, and themes as much as the film itself.  Personally living through it makes it even more attractive. This idea, which occurred to me after the film The Third Page, turned  into a thought after the film Fate. It took me two years to overcome my  anger and feelings, and the subjectivity of the experience. Finally I became satisfied that I had accomplished this, therefore the result was a distant film free of biographic and personal qualities.

About the Director: Zeki Demirkubuz

Born in Isparta in 1964, Demirkubuz is a graduate of the Istanbul University Department of Communications. He began his career as an assistant to director Zeki Okten.  His first film, Block C (C Blok), and his later works have mainly been based on original screenplays conceived and written by Demirkubuz himself.    Demirkubuz first gained the notice of film critics and international audiences with Innocence (Masumiyet) and later with The Third Page(Ucuncu Sayfa), which were screened at numerous film festivals in Turkey and Europe, including the film festivals of Venice, Locarno and Rotterdam and the Boston Turkish Film Festival.    This was followed by the successful reception of Fate (Yazgi) and Confession (Itiraf), which were among the films of the 2nd Boston Turkish Film Festival, and both films were screened at Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Fate and Confession, are the first two features in Tales About Darkness, a trilogy set to conclude with The Waiting Room (Bekleme odası). With Fate and Confession, Zeki Demirkubuz has become the first director to have two films screened at the same time in Cannes.   Demirkubuz won a FIPRESCI (The International Federation of Film Critics) Award and the Best Director prize at the Istanbul Film Festival for Fate and Confession. Fate also won Best Director and Best 3rd Film awards, and the Jury Special Award at the 38th Golden Orange Film Festival in Antalya, Turkey.  Zeki Demirkubuz won the Best Director of the Year Award with The Waiting Room (Bekleme Odasi) in the Istanbul Film Festival on April 24, 2004.   Filmography:   Block C (C Blok, 1994) Innocence (Masumiyet, 1997) The Third Page (Ucuncu Sayfa, 1999) Fate (Yazgi, 2001) Confession (Itiraf, 2001) The Waiting Room (Bekleme Odasi, 2003)

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