Film Review: Babam ve Oğlum (2005) | The Lens
Fathers, sons, and the bittersweet taste of rural Anatolia.
This review is part of our The Lens: Film and Media in the Middle East series.
Babam ve Oğlum, or My Father and My Son, is a 2005 Turkish drama film by set in the 1980s Aegean countryside post-1980-coup. While the film production was a humble affair, Babam ve Oğlum quickly gained nationwide acclaim and an iconic position in Turkish cinema.
It isn’t difficult to see how Babam ve Oğlum attained this praise—Çağan Irmak, the director and writer, has woven a distinctly Turkish tale of family, love, imagination, and heartbreak. The film centers around three characters: Sadık (Fikret Kuşkan), a leftist journalist jailed in the 1980 military coup; his son Deniz (Ege Tanman), who grows up in the care of a neighbor in Istanbul; and his father (Çetin Tekindor), a landowner in an Aegean village. Sadık, who has been estranged from his father since his youth, makes the pivotal decision to move back home upon a damning medical diagnosis. In order to entrust his son to his father’s care, Sadık must mend the contemptuous relationship between them.
Deniz becomes instrumental in this process; his childlike innocence and fervent imagination capture the love and adoration of the family. However, the blissfulness is only fleeting—Sadık’s diagnosis is revealed, and the family must come to terms with the tragedy. The film grapples with painful questions: what does it mean to grow up? How do we deal with loss and regret in the context of love, family, and estrangement?
While the film is not overtly political, the representation of the political turmoil of the era is obvious to those familiar with Turkish history. Sadık’s disagreement with his father in his youth stems from his leftist political radicalization. He believes that his father, a well-to-do village aga who owns much of the land and employs many other village folk, is participating in a corrupt and evil system—one that most Turks would defend as tradition. He makes a career out of radical journalism, but Sadık’s life is ruined because of it: his wife dies while giving birth in the coup, and he is jailed and brutally tortured for months. It is a dismal representation of the possibility of change and hope for progress in Turkish society, yet it is brutally honest in that reflects the silencing of the political left in the country for the past four decades.
What makes Babam ve Oğlum resonate deeply with the Turkish audience is the contextualization of the film into Anatolian Turkish culture. It is set in an Aegean village: farm fields and other classic Turkish locales like the bakkal and teahouse are often featured as settings. The characters, too, are magnificently crafted and acted—they are fierce, sentimental, and real. The village lifestyle is represented as simple and joyful, yet the Turkish people are no strangers to suffering, a familiar aspect of modern Turkish history. The bleakness of the heartbreak and political turmoil serve to make the movie quintessentially Turkish. The soundtrack by Evanthia Reboutsika also plays a significant role in this contextualization. Masterfully made, the soundtrack is primarily based on Anatolian/Aegean folk music with some Western influence; it utilizes the versatility of Anatolian folk music to portray sorrow, joy, and everything in between: the bittersweet that is Babam ve Oğlum.
Listen to the soundtrack here.
author | sude a. is a circassian-turkish student from houston, tx. she likes culture, film, the betterment of society, and can be reliably found scrolling twitter at 2 am.
