SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: Bland title, potentially fascinating subject, dull execution. C-. That’s my fairly harsh assessment of Turkish filmmakers Özgür Dogan and Orhan Eskiköy’s doc On the Way to School.
There’s plenty of raw material in the Turkish government’s contentious policy of forced assimilation, requiring children in Kurdish areas to learn and speak Turkish as the official language, at the expense of their own language.
The doc follows Emre Aydin, a rookie Turkish teacher who is posted to a primary school in the remote Kurdish village of Demirci; most of the kids don’t speak Turkish, and he doesn’t understand their language.
But the issue of discrimination is almost glossed over, save for one of the parents who says he was laughed at when he had to fill in forms specifying the languages he speaks, and he listed Turkish and his native Kurdish.
The film depicts the villagers living in abject poverty in houses with stone floors, with limited water and frequent power outages, which makes life miserable in the middle of winter. Still, the kids seem remarkably cheerful and accepting of their lot, and the adults are stoic.
Initially it’s a culture shock for Emre, who hails from the prosperous, cosmopolitan western city of Denizli. The language gap is a huge problem for teacher and students. 'They just sit there staring and do not understand a thing," he laments in one of his regular phone calls to his sympathetic mother.
Emre shows remarkable patience and dedication as he builds a strong rapport with the children, teaches them words, how to draw and to recite the Turkish oath ('Happy is the one who says I am a Turk.") We see him lose his cool just once. He arranges a meeting with parents, where he informs them some kids are turning up without notebooks. 'Forgive us teacher, it’s the best we can do," responds one mother.
Beyond that, we glean few insights into Emre’s background, whether he’s bothered by the poverty around him, and his hopes and aspirations. And there’s too much footage of the kids’ humdrum lives, playing, squabbling and eating.
At the end of his first year in Demirci, the kids have made good progress, as documented in their reports, and Emre heads off for a well-earned break at home with mum.
But this film is a missed opportunity to investigate the questions of the integration, education, cultural and ethnic identity of the Kurdish minority. Perhaps it’s significant that the Ankara-based filmmakers were denied funding by Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Ministry and were forced to go outside the country for finance. Eventually they cobbled together enough money from Dutch co-producer Pieter Van Huystee, the Sundance Documentary Film Program, the European Union-backed Greenhouse feature-length documentary workshop and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s Jan Vrijman Fund.
In an interview with a Turkish newspaper, Eskiköy said the film will screen at this year’s Istanbul International Film Festival but he doubted any TV channel in Turkey would show it. In my view, the doc would make acceptable and intermittently enlightening viewing on TV in the West, but it doesn’t get a passing grade as a theatrical feature.
The most perceptive comment I came across isn’t made by the doc but by a Turkish reporter who observed that, apart from the teacher, these kids and their parents have been forgotten by the State.
