Hasan The Rose

Hasan the Rose

Hasan the Rose, the first feature film, for which Tuncel Kurtiz went behind the camera, following his years as an actor of stage and screen and after the short films he has directed, didn’t receive the same attention here in Turkey as abroad. It was overlooked and was almost subject to a wish to be ‘forgetten’ immediately. What we have here is a work reflecting Kurtiz’s contradiction, even ‘struggle’ with the given relations in the sector apart from his participation in some of the most prominent films of Turkish cinema from The Bus to On Fertile Lands, from Law of the Borders to the Herd. The film, narrating in a tragicomic style with ‘natural exaggeration’, the defrauding and exploitation of Turkish citizens working in Europe by a double-dealing director who’s the leader of a band, with the promise o giving them parts in the film he’s about the shoot, is a concrete reflection of the anger Kurtiz feels for some of the directors he has previously worked with. Let’s state that apart from presenting a interesting example of ‘cinema looks at cinema’ and dealing with the problems of our migrant workers with a perspective of class, the performances of the actors in Hasan the Rose are quite distinguished. Tunca Arslan