Father

The film, intriguing for its sober expression and focused understanding of the topic, explores ten-year-old Nori's inner and outer worlds. He encounters nothing but turmoil, and although he lives in a large patriarchal family, he compensates for his emotional distress by developing a strong fixation on his father. Gezim, however, is a weak-willed outsider who uses his son to earn a meager living selling cigarettes on the street. He never wants to talk about why his wife left him, and one day he himself decides to abandon the boy and his former life for a naïve vision of Germany as a change for the better. Desperate Nori's secret journey to find his father occupies a large part of the story, during which he gets knocked down hard but learns to snap back with resilience. In the end he is more grown-up than Gezim ever was, but this statement suggests a bitterness over a childhood lost among people whose sole forms of communication are harsh words, hands raised in aggression, injustice, and betrayal. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)