</span>The frigid blizzards of Finland are a good background for our protagonist, Rojin (Dilan Gwyn), at the moment we enter her life. The cold interactions with her coworkers lead to awkward tensions with her daughter and husband at home. Rojin is lost, disconnected from her family, and searching for purpose in some altruistic quest to help the world. As her domestic life nears dissolution, she’s forced to appropriately adjust for a visit from her father Nizam (Ali Seçkiner Alici) coming in from Sweden. He claims he’s on an extended tour to visit friends in order “to kill time”. Seçkiner Alici is extraordinary, stealing every scene with his pensive and enigmatic wisdom. His presence simultaneously threatens Rojin’s day-to-day, and gives an opportunity for a journey of rediscovery, in which she confronts her habits and childhood traumas.
It’s been 12 years since Turkish director Erol Mintaş’s previous feature film Song of My Mother. Mintaş subsequently moved to Helsinki in 2017 and secured funding from the Finnish Film Foundation for his latest endeavour. Earth Song is a product of years of Mintaş negotiating and reexamining his own experience of balancing Kurdish identity in Finland and, for the first time, being an observer of Finnish culture. The moments when Mintaş writes in Finnish characters feel almost surreal. They include a Theremin player in a freezing cold cemetery. Rojin’s main struggle with a sense of aimlessness is accurately captured because of how her world is written around her. The Helsinki of Mintaş’s screenplay is one of bureaucratic and casual interaction. There are plenty of things happening around our characters but for Rojin, there’s still a tangible distance.
Similarly to Song of My Mother, Mintaş’ sensibilities remind one of the type of heartfelt and earnest explorations of family ties you’d find in a film by Iranian Majid Majidi. Mintaş’s writing is sharp, empathetic and powerfully relevant.
The film’s most striking scenes are when Mintaş removes any embellishment or detour and just focuses on two of his characters discussing a disagreement, whether that’s Rojin and her father, Rojin and Ferhat, her husband, or Rojin and her daughter, etc. These scenes are tremendous. Mintaş directed his actors to understand their character beyond their surface-level desires. He educated them on the complicated and often contradictory internal battles they’re having from a previous conversation in the film. A scene where Ferhat asks Rojin to not pursue her work abroad in order to take care of their daughter (so he himself can take advantage of an international opportunity) transforms into a layered break-down of the marriage in such a delicate and effective manner.
Mintaş and his cinematographer Juice Huhtala make some strong choices with their framing in order to complement the director’s ability to develop interpersonal relationships and character chemistry. On the other hand, the images are somewhat bland. In a film with so many interior shorts, the contrast requires more emphasis, and the blocking needs improvement.
There is an ambition to take on as many family conflicts and dramatic beats as possible. At its best, it gives more opportunities for Mintaş to build up his protagonist with her conversations with her father and how their lives parallel or deviate from one another. But it also clutters the narrative, especially with a runtime of nearly two hours. As a consequence, some narrative arcs are not fully fulfilled.
Th3e gravitation towards the dramatic yet wordless demands a lot from the cast. While the performances by Ali Seçkiner Alici and Zenan Tünc should be highlighted, the leading performance by Dilan Gwyn is sometimes a little misplaced, with some unwarranted melodramatic tones.
Ultimately, this is a bold film that deconstructs the family drama genre with a crucial twist.
Earth Song just premiered in the 55th edition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
