Çağan Irmak

(Youtube Streaming, April 2022) A common failure mode of using best-of movie lists as mandatory viewing guides is the presumption that every film on the list is an utter masterpiece. That way lies disappointment and madness – a far better approach is to see the best-of lists as samplers where every pick has some kind of baseline quality. Seeing My Father and My Son pop up on lists such as the IMDB 250 creates expectations that the film probably can’t match – even ignoring that IMDB is a favourite battleground for Turkish viewers wanting to manipulate rankings to boost or bomb specific films. The film begins with a melodramatic bang, as a man tries to get his pregnant wife to a hospital, but is left to his own devices due to the 1980 coup and suffers fatal consequences. The rest of the film, alas, doesn’t quite go as hard as the opening, as the father, years later once out of prison, goes back to the family farm in rural Turkey in order to make sure that his son finds a home given his own fatal disease. There’s dynamism to the film’s execution by writer-director Çağan Irmak, especially when it focuses on the young boy’s imagination and translates flights of fancy into fantastic visions given form. This more comic material eventually meshes with the more tragedy of a father trying to reconcile with his estranged family before his own death, and integrating his son in their lives. It’s not a bad film: the glimpse in a place that most of us will never know – a Turkish family farm—is often evocative, and there’s some very emotional content later on as the boy learns to say goodbye to his father. Is it necessarily a top-250 film of all time? I can’t answer that for you. But its presence on the list will, at least, open up an entire national cinema – if you like My Father and My Son, there are plenty of similar films just waiting for you.