Synopsis
Zehra (18), works at a great service station on the motorway and lives with her family in a local village. Her father sells hardware in a small truck. Her mother is a housewife. Zehra works 24hr shifts. When she is not working she spends the day sleeping and daydreaming about the rich lives of those she sees on TV. Her closest friend and confidante is Nezahat who also works at the same service station, an independent and confidant woman. Olgun (18) is a waiter in this service station and lives in the nearby city with his family. He wants to get rich and be a powerful man as soon as possible. Olgun loves Zehra yet his attempts to impress her have little impact. Olgun’s father works for the council as head of the stray dog team. He is constantly at loggerheads with Olgun. His mother keeps the peace and the house in order. One day Mahur (38), comes to the service station, a charismatic truck driver who has spent his life on the road. Zehra meets him at a circumcision party. She is strangely affected by the erotic dancing of Mahur which awakens completely new feelings in her. Zehra returns home with the secret of having been aroused. She falls in love with this man who will drive her to a new life in his great truck. Despite Mahur’s erratic appearances, a clandestine love affair goes on between him and Zehra. Zehra discovers the realms of passion and her own body and she becomes newly confident and courageous. Olgun is drowning in the combined stresses of his unrequited love, his altercations with his father and his non-happening dreams of being rich. One day Zehra learns that she is pregnant. They go to get an abortion with Nezahat, but Zehra decides to keep the child. She focuses her courage now on the unborn child and loses her faith in Mahur. Mahur has realized that there is no future for them and he resolves never to come back that way. Olgun has a serious confrontation with his father and at the same time he learns of Zehra’s secret. He releases his ensuing anger and pain on Nezahat and ends up in prison. In the end everyone sees how ruthlessly cruel life can be, yet despite this Zehra and Olgun have grown up along the way and discover the path of forgiveness and reunion.
DIRECTOR’S PROFILE
After making several award winning short films in Turkey, Yesim USTAOGLU made her debut feature film with 1994’s THE TRACK. The film was presented at numerous international festivals, including Moscow and Göteborg. Yesim USTAOGLU received international recognition with her 1999 film, Journey to the Sun. In competition at the Berlin Film Festival, Journey to the Sun received the Blue Angel Award (Best European Film) and the Peace Prize. The moving story of a courageous friendship undaunted by political cruelty, Journey to the Sun swept the Istanbul Festival awards by winning Best Film, Best Director, FIPRESCI Prize and the Audience Award. Waiting for the Clouds(2003) is the story of a woman forced to live for 50 years with the haunting secrets of a hidden identity. The project was awarded by NHK Sundance International Filmmaker’s award and the DAAD scholarship (founded by the German Academic Exchange Service) with which Yesim USTAOGLU confirmed her international reputation as an auteur filmmaker. Her last film Pandora’s Box(2008) won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival. The film received international acclaim and was released theatrically in many territories, going on to win numerous awards.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Limbo is a place of waiting between heaven and earth. This exactly represents Zehra's and Olgun’s situation. This is a story of a generation of young people growing up in this cultural limbo wherein they are almost entirely disenfranchised from their rich cultural roots which could have sustained them within the on-flowing engulfing tide of modern and spiritually defunct capitalism and its anonymous universal conformity. The story symbolically is set on a motorway park connecting Ankara and Istanbul, a place where people of all backgrounds pass by creating an interesting collage or pastiche where the ethnic and the modern mix into a gaudy cultural mosaic where their juxtaposition disposes of and alienates any of the grace or value of either. One can find almost anything here: A small mosque, toilets, restaurants, shops where everything from the Koran to neon lit toys are for sale…For most of the time the TV blares out cheap melodramas or sports, as an offering to the general cacophony of noise. New money in its' compulsory 4x4s mingle with ancient dusty village bangers threateningly overshadowed by the great overland coaches swerving in to rest by the myriad of other vehicles each as varied in identity and background as their passengers but all connected for one shared moment in this place of amalgamation. In a backward, featureless village where years of wanton and willful political strategy have disconnected the people from their cultural heritage, history and land, reducing the parameters of their culture to a narrow-minded and ignorant nationalism tightly held within the encapsulating growth of universal modernism. This is the backdrop against which our hero’s fate is played out. Limbo doesn't just reflect the struggles of Turkish young men and women, but is also applicable to today’s youth all over the world and their social and personal evolution amid this all-encompassing globalism.