Reis Çelik's 'Night of Blindness' Debuts at Shanghai
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- Reis Çelik unveiled 'Night of Blindness' at the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival, where the Turkish-German co-production is competing for the Golden Goblet Award in the main competition section.
- The film follows Fatma, a left-wing activist who hides in a cramped space between wooden planks at a construction site and must rely on workers she has never met to evade capture during Turkey's 1980 military coup.
- Çelik said at the SIFF press conference that he chose a female protagonist because most films about political oppression feature male leads, and he wanted 'to give voice to women in this genre.'
- 'Night of Blindness' was shot in black and white — Çelik argued that color can obscure a story's emotional core and that he wanted audiences to focus on 'the nakedness of the story and the eyes looking out through the narrow wooden gap.'
- The film is the second entry in Çelik's planned Night Trilogy, following 'Night of Silence' (2012), which won the Crystal Bear at Berlin; a third film, tentatively titled 'Sağır Gece' (Night of the Deaf), is also planned.
- Çelik said the trilogy reflects his concern that humanity is 'moving toward a point where people no longer hear, see or understand one another,' and argued that 'Turkey and China have a lot in common in terms of worldview and history.'
- Lead actors İştar Gökşeven (military commander) and Aydin Orak (inspector) attended the press event, with Gökşeven noting that performing in near-total darkness forced him to rely on voice, posture, and shadow to convey emotion.
- The Shanghai International Film Festival runs through June 21.
Why it matters: By deliberately screening a film about a left-wing activist hunted during a military coup at a major Chinese state-backed festival, and publicly drawing a Turkey-China parallel on political 'worldview and history,' Çelik is testing how much political content China's flagship cinema event will platform — a question that matters for the festival's curatorial identity ahead of its June 21 close.
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