It is a common misconception for honour killings to be associated with the customs of a particular culture or a particular geographical region and regarded as an ‘ethnic’ or ‘women’s issue’. The truth is that honour killings are a problem peculiar feudal communities where the individual has no place, communities that are left to the mercy of a patriarchate, be he an agha or a sheikh. It is this aspect of honour killings that provides Handan İpekçi with her focus in Hidden Faces, a film that explores the impact of honour killings on all the individual members of a family – women, men, children and adults. A boy of not quite 18 is compelled to strangle his older sister’s newborn baby, and the film seeks an answer to the question of whether the boy can live with a clean conscience. From a social problem so weighty, Hidden Faces elicits a hybrid of the film-within-a-film, road film and suspense genres. We find ourselves in the thick of a protracted honour ‘case’ involving young Zühre, who is saved from almost certain death let’s say by a twist of fate. Along the way, however, she unwittingly causes the murder of a man and a baby, and the suicide of two men crushed by the pressure on them. A director is shooting a documentary on the story and by having his real-life actors watch the film, he reopens the feud once more. Each of the characters, who live in guilt, fear and with the desire for revenge, sets off in pursuit of the surviving victim. The sequence of events falls into place through flashbacks as these characters drift off into their memories, creating emotional suspense in the process. Both the characters on screen and we ourselves begin reckoning with the issue at hand, the past and the sanctity of the right to life. Alin Taşçıyan
