Tayfun Pirselimoglu - Hiçbiryerde AKA In Nowhere Land (2002)

In Turkey, more than a thousand people go missing “normally” every year and only half can be found. Some of these people go missing while in police custody.

Dedicated to his mother and to all mothers, writer-director Tayfun Pirselimoðlu’s fictional Hiçbiryerde follows a mother’s search for her missing son. When she is asked whether her son was involved in politics, Sükran answers, “Certainly not.” After losing her husband, a political prisoner, Sükran had determined to keep hold of her son, Veysel; but the boy, after all, was also his father’s son.

Indeed, Veysel and factory co-worker and close friend Halil are both missing, but Halil’s father has no interest in placing himself at risk to press authorities about his son’s absence. The truth is, Veysel is likely already dead. The film opens with Sükran’s fainting at the sight of the corpse, with its face smashed in, that authorities had asked if she could identify. Sükran insists this is not her son, but perhaps only in a state of denial aimed at keeping hope alive. Veysel’s girlfriend has identified the body as her boyfriend’s on the basis of familiarity with his body. The dead boy even had the same birthmark on his groin. “My son had no such birthmark!” Sükran explodes, but she may be contesting his having passed from her own primary influence to this girl’s. Indeed, she charges the girlfriend with having “filled Veysel’s head” with all the “nonsense” that may have gotten him into trouble.

When she hears that a prisoner with her son’s exact name, Veysel Aksu, escaped from a police transport and has been seen in Mardin, she leaves Istanbul by train for Mardin, takes a hotel room, and does her best to track down her son. Eventually, a clandestine meeting is arranged between her and Veysel, but this Veysel Aksu, expecting to be reunited with his mother, turns out to be some other mother’s son. This contributes to Pirselimoðlu’s theme that responsibility for all children falls on all of us. When later asked whether the corpse of this other Veysel Aksu is her son, this time Sükran says yes. She has become the dead boy’s Mother of Loss, and her identification of his remains mirror-images and symbolically reverses her earlier refusal to identify the earlier set of remains as her son’s. (~ wordpress.com / Dennis Grunes, 2009)