At the ongoing Cannes Film Festival, a biopic featuring the famous Turkish photographer Ara Güler was officially announced. This is not only a brand new film project, but also has extraordinary significance for Turkey and Armenia, the two countries that are co-producing the film.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a horrific incident of the extermination of Armenians occurred in the Ottoman Empire, with the death toll reaching one million. Currently, many countries, including Russia, the United States, Canada, and France, have characterized this incident as genocide or genocide. However, Turkey, which inherited the territory and history of the Ottoman Empire, has always been unwilling to recognize such a characterization, which has led to tensions with Armenia. The two countries have not even established diplomatic embassies to each other. However, in recent years, the relationship between the two sides seems to have eased. The relevant negotiations on the normalization of diplomatic relations have gone through five rounds of consultations since 2022. The fact that the two countries can now cooperate in filming a film also marks the deepening of cultural exchanges.
Turkish photographer Ala Güler
The tentative title of the biopic of Ala Güler is "Hello". The two directors of the film are Ela Alyamac, a Turk of Armenian descent born in 1978, and Aren Perdeci from Armenia. The production companies behind it are Kara Kedi Film Company from Turkey and Anso Film Company from Armenia. Therefore, it is called the first film ever jointly produced by Turkey and Armenia, "representing an unprecedented ideal of cultural cooperation and mutual communication."
The two directors had previously collaborated on the film "Lost Bird".
In fact, despite the unfriendly relations between the two countries, the director duo Ella Ayyamark and Arun Petishi had collaborated as early as 2015, co-directing the Turkish film "Lost Birds". The film's time and space background was an Armenian village in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, and it became the first work in Turkish film history to slightly touch upon this sensitive history.
The protagonist of their new film, Ala Güler, was born in an Armenian family in Istanbul on August 16, 1928. At the age of 30, he became the chief photojournalist of Life magazine in Turkey. Later, he became friends with Henri Cartier-Bresson, the "father of modern photojournalism", and Marc Riboud, a famous French photographer. He joined the famous Magnum Photos and won the "Leica Master" Award in 1962, becoming the most famous photographer in Turkish history. Since then, because of his cooperation with Orhan Pamuk, a famous Turkish writer and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Ala Güler has won great popularity worldwide and even has the reputation of "The Eye of Istanbul". On October 18, 2018, he died of a heart attack at the age of 90, and Turkish President Erdogan also spoke highly of him.
Pamuk wrote the preface to Ala Güler's collection of photographs on Istanbul.
It is understood that the two directors were fortunate to get Ala Güler's promise to bring his life story to the screen before his death, and the core of the story will be the short journey he and his father took back to his hometown to trace their roots after he became famous. "When he was alive, he always told us that the most unforgettable journey in his life was taking his father back to the small Armenian village where they were born." The two directors said in an interview with the media.
In addition to film production companies from Armenia and Turkey, "Hello" has also received support from the Turkish Culture Ministry's Film Fund. Turkish public broadcaster TRT and Turkey's Dogus, which owns the Ala Güler archive, will also be involved, but the specific cast and start date have not yet been determined.
"Artistic collaboration can heal wounds and build bonds, and Hello aims to demonstrate the power of film art to transcend national boundaries, promote mutual understanding and celebrate our shared heritage," the two directors told the media.
