The Grave’s Soil (Script)

Published as a Thesis Project, 2005 - Be shooted in 2011 (Waiting for the producer)

In a region famous for its Turkish baths, in a time when big families were still living together, in a mansion where a family lived that made a living running a Turkish bath and where the power was in the hands of the head of the family, İnayet Hanım, into an atmosphere of domestic strife and decay, the last of the grandchildren, Muharrem, was born… Because of the conditions that were triggered in her youth, continued in her old age, occured when she was healthy and came into being for reasons beyond her control, İnayet Hanım regards her smallest grandchild Muharrem as a threat to her symbolic power. The news of the death of her oldest son Buhur Bey, who arrived the same day, even the same time, and the suicide of Raziye, her oldest daughter-in-law, the next day, only help her to make this belief more malignant.

As ‘familial unconscious places’, both the Turkish bath that provides a living for the family and the mansion where the family lives, are, with their people, their insanes and semi-deads, reservoirs to which ‘the repressed’ will return…

With the wish of prohibition and cancellation toward Muharrem she developed within herself, İnayet Hanım is actually, with her body and emotions, waging a multi-layered internal battle that is not quite clear: The secret inheritance of the last two children she adopted during her marriage, the things she did because of that guilt and, relatedly, her parents’ tragic stories they carried out on her a long time ago…

Two covered, stone and wooden buildings as boxes of ill omen in which the notion of family doesn’t have meaning even at the level of I / you / s/he; where roles are confused with symbolic barter… This is all the tense order of the two fantastic places İnayet Hanım has been building for forty years… In fact, it is a wish to erase her own ‘circumstance’… With her ‘subject’ness found in these I-places, İnayet Hanım has regarded Muharrem as a genuine-mother figure that can only gain meaning through his murder by her… Actually, before ‘revenge’, she has searched for an object to kill to allay her sense of guilt… And unfortunately her youngest son and daughter give her an answer like this: They give her one last grandchild after Muharrem, which is a blessing for Muharrem for the newborn, rather than Muharrem, is killed immediately… Muharrem’s invasion of her giant fantastic double-place/space that came next symbolizes, as a last calamity that needs to be thwarted, a big “evil” to be feared, her own mother whose placenta she is going to nail, the reason that she has come out!

Ali Rıza’s consent that came with property and posessions, Raziye, the half-insane wife of his oldest son, the children out of wed-lock that she abused when they were little and the extra-sibling relationship this caused, these were all easy, planned escapes… But the last grand-child and the endurance of the youngest daughter-in-law were enough: The rottenness was itcing! Nevertheless, İnayet Hanım wasn’t ready… She wasn’t ready for a face-to-face meeting…

With daughter-in-law Şaduman and nursemaid Sultan’s support “husband” Ali Rıza gives a chance to Muharrem to breathe, this way he can breathe, too… After that, the nursemaid and the daughter-in-law complete İnayet Hanım’s paradoxical, dangerous confusion that has turned into prayer-like mumblings and which stem from herself; her untamed, evil, selfish, broken and enormous concerto with a specific cadence: They take Muharrem and escape six months after Ali Rıza’s death… On the other hand, İnayet Hanım observes the quick crumbling of her symbolic power… And she is trapped under the ruins… The abandonment of the mansion is maybe the first death that has occured there.

Her obsessions and precautions that continue for a while do not affect the others around her anymore. What comes with the stroke is semi-oblivion, semi-‘deadness’… The people around her who thus show signs of getting well now stand against ‘her’ and forbid ‘her’. The stroke that paralyzes her right side promises even her a time to get well; it causes hallucinations... It gives her opportunities… The stroke leaves her alone with her crimes and denials through a loss of reality that seems like a division of her integrity into two: Emin Nafi Bey… Emin Bey… And Sabahat Hanım…

A second “nullification” from those once under her power makes it impossible for her to find satisfaction in her hallucinations anymore… Her ‘last’ futile effort; she makes her youngest son Emin do the deed – the deed that was who knows how many times delayed: What her mother couldn’t do to her mother, she does to her mother. What her mother couldn’t do even to her: Being terminated by terminating. Hatice and her husband Ebubekir who ‘nullified’ her while she was semi-living, are also ‘nullified’… Even the younger grandchildren Ahmet and Ayşe are not “lucky”… Muharrem, an orphan without a family, changes hands like a crossed out McGuffin: What comes next is that Muharrem becomes the ones he is now a part of… Now they are, with Melek who misses her past, widowed Şaduman and forlorn Sultan, the “three mothers”…