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Y committed synopsis11/23/2023 ![]() He’s one small hypocrite in a hypocritical world, Kaplanoğlu seems to suggest to us as he foregrounds the ban on Turkish farmers selling products treated with pesticides to European Union countries, despite Germany being allowed to do so. Once again availing himself of director of photography Ozgur Eken, who shot the film in 6K using a Sony Venice camera, the director lingers over nature-based elements in order to emphasise the distance between an ideal world and the hypocritical one in which the protagonist moves as he seeks out forgiveness from those he has betrayed. Hasan is a product of our times, torn between his love for nature and his own self-interest, desperate to protect the wellbeing he has won for himself by way of favours within a corrupt system. There’s complicity between the two of them, but there’s also a huge void, resulting from a mutual sense of guilt. His wife Emin is no better when it comes to meanness and small-mindedness hidden beneath good manners. ![]() When he hears, from a bank employee, about another landowner’s bankruptcy, Haman seizes on this opportunity and buys up his land at a rock-bottom price, sending his colleague to the cleaners and spending an enormous sum on the hotel which he will be staying at during his pilgrimage. Indeed, it’s this very same judge that Hasan turns to in order to get the dreaded pylon pushed back onto one of his neighbour’s lands. There’s an air of corruption hanging over the judge who assigned Hasan’s home and lands to him, and his older brother ( Mahir Günşiray) hasn’t spoken to him for twenty years since. Over the course of the film, we learn that our protagonist isn’t quite the squeaky clean and virtuous man he first seemed and who he believes himself to be. And for Hassan this will prove a particular onerous task. But as all fellow believers are aware, pilgrims can only make their way to this sacred place once they have obtained the blessing of all those they have wronged. But this doesn’t distract him from an important event which he’s about to take part in: after a three-year wait, he has finally been chosen to make the pilgrimage to Mecca alongside his wife Emin ( Filiz Bozok). Hasan is a farmer who owns land inherited from his father in the Ankara province: we see him tending to his apples and tomatoes alongside his workers, and fighting to prevent the installation of a huge, high-voltage tower carrying Yeni Akım Elektrik’s new power line. The titular Hasan is played by Umut Karadag, a well-known face in his homeland, and a bit of a George Clooney, just with less hair and stern, sorrowful eyes.
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