A Canadian film about a manure collector with forty years of experience was shown in St. Petersburg
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Dry grass has become a symbol of state of mind for directors from different countries.
The Canadian documentary “Geography of Loneliness” opened the international competition program of the 33rd festival “Message to Man”, held in St. Petersburg. It is difficult to imagine how a woman could live alone on an island for forty years among wild horses and seals, studying animal dung and remains.
The deserted Sable Island stretches along a narrow 32-kilometer strip in the Atlantic Ocean, 160 km from the coast of Scotland. Dry yellow grass, sand dunes and wind, seals’ heads sticking out of the water, a herd of wild horses – that’s all there is. Moreover, she is an elderly woman who has lived half her life alone. In 1971, Zoe Lucas first came to Sable as a journalist to see the wild horses that had been brought there to graze in the wild. There are no predators, so fences for pastures are not needed. Then Zoe came again as a cook as part of a university expedition to study seals and stayed for the rest of her life. She became a self-taught ecologist, recording observations of wildlife, horses, and studying their remains and dung in notebooks.
Aspiring director Jacqueline Mills learned about Zoe Lucas from a TV report and was inspired to visit her. She shot her debut film on 16mm film, which preserved grains of sand, bugs and spiders clinging to it, a dim image that imbued the cinema with the energy of its former life. A number cannot be so expressive and bear the stamp of time. Together with Zoe, Jacqueline wandered around the island in search of horse hair and manure, genetic material, animal remains, skulls cleaned with sand until white. Zoey spends hours digging through decaying flesh, red manes touched by decay. Over the past ten years, she has collected a whole collection of excrement, extracted from them seeds, algae, and a ribbon from a balloon. We hardly see the face of this brave woman, only strands of gray hair from under her hat flutter in the wind like dry grass. But in the old photo she is young and beautiful. In fact, for the sake of manure, she gave up love and communication with people. It is difficult to understand and accept this.
The “Cinema of Super-Reality” program featured the Russian premiere of the film “About Dry Grass” by Turkish director, multiple winner of the Cannes Film Festival, winner of its highest award “Palme d’Or” Nuri Bilge Ceylan. He is an expert on Russian classical literature, especially Chekhov, and an admirer of Tarkovsky. The main character of his new film, the village teacher Samet, is very similar to the young Leo Tolstoy, and Ceylan does not have accidents. The teacher was played by Deniz Jeliloglu, familiar to many from the series “The Magnificent Century”. Working with Ceylan is like a breakthrough into space for him.
Türkiye on the screen is not at all touristy – winter, harsh, meager. The village, located in Anatolia, where Samet must work for four years, is dense and merciless. Local schoolchildren saw the sea only on TV. Only one boy visited his aunt who lives on the coast.
Rural teachers, and they are almost all single people, dream of leaving here as quickly as possible, striving for Istanbul, like Chekhov’s sisters for Moscow. Sometimes it seems to them that it is impossible to escape from the quagmire of everyday life. They are like dry grass, which we will see in the finale. They will write a denunciation against two teachers, accusing them of not maintaining the proper distance from their students. The word “pedophilia” will not be heard, but there is something unspoken in Samet’s relationship with one of the schoolgirls. The director leaves us with this mystery. It is as insoluble as the hero’s exit from the frame at some point. It’s like he leaves the set and then comes back. And here it is not clear where we are, whether everything we see is true, or just a convention.
A meeting with a young teacher Nurai, who lives in a neighboring town, brightens up the lives of lonely men. She is really very good, and the absence of a leg and a prosthesis as a result of a car accident do not make her any less attractive. It’s not for nothing that the actress Merve Dizdar was awarded an award in Cannes – she is magnificent and has not yet done anything special except for this role. The film runs 197 minutes, frightening the viewer in advance with its timing, but three hours pass unnoticed – a rare sight that brings unsettling happiness.
Newspaper headline:
Forty years of life in manure
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