04/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: The rising Turkish director dissects his taut new feature, which is equally a courtroom procedural and a character study

Musa (Oğulcan Arman Uslu) has been accused of murdering his former boss at his factory job; CCTV footage of him departing the scene provides key circumstantial evidence. Canan (Tülin Ozen) is the only lawyer willing to defend him, whilst in the off-hours between the trial, she dotes on her dying mother in hospital.

Selman Nacar’s second feature, Hesitation Wound [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Selman Nacar
film profile], world-premiering in Venice’s Orizzonti section, pivots on this precipice between public and private life, sketching an authentic world and then gradually unveiling its characters’ souls. Nacar, a law graduate himself, told us more.

Cineuropa: Where did the initial idea for Hesitation Wound come from?
Selman Nacar: I studied law in my undergraduate education, so I was always interested in morality and ethics. But when I'm writing a story, I always start with the character. Specifically for this project, we have a lead character that’s stuck in between her professional life and her personal life, her needs and her expectations. I wanted to put her in the centre and then show her around many different men, and in the context of a small city. I had some questions regarding justice and how much we can defend someone.

How did you cast Canan and Musa, and develop those characters with the actors?
I did many auditions, especially for the character of Canan, but when I met with Tülin [Özen], her perspective really affected me. We worked for almost a year, making many observations on what happens in a courthouse, how a lawyer acts, their way of walking and talking. But with the focus on Canan’s personal life, we needed to create unity in her character’s personality.

For Musa, the accused, Oğulcan Arman Uslu clearly understood the character very well. Of course, he's in jail, but when we think about these kinds of people, there are stereotypes in our mind that we wanted to avoid. There is a neighbourhood we were shooting in where those kinds of people live, let's say. And Arman spent some time there and immersed himself.

Along with sharing the theme of crime and punishment, your two features [this and Between Two Dawns [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Selman Nacar
film profile]] also use factories as key locations, and revolve around the danger and fatalities that can arise in that space.
When we talk about justice, class difference is really important. In both films, I wanted to choose characters from different economic and cultural classes, and try to reflect on how it makes them different: their behaviour, their reactions, everything. And I didn't want to do this in a clichéd way. The factory is a really important location in order to show this difference, visually.

The visual and structural symmetry in the two films is striking as well, right down to the precise choice of shots.
While I’m writing a story, it's not always stemming from analytical thinking; instead, it’s intuitive. But I’m interested in characters that are in stuck in between emotions because I believe Turkey is in a similar situation. It's not Europe; perhaps it’s equally not Middle Eastern – it's really in between. In Between Two Dawns, I wanted to start the film with the factory to emphasise its role in the movie. The white images of the fabric show a place that provides jobs to many workers. But at the end, I wanted to finish with close-ups instead, almost visualising them as monsters.

With the churning of the machines, they never stop. Life goes on, even if you die. For Hesitation Wound, I chose its closing shot carefully: we are looking at the city, just like the opening, when Musa is driven to the courthouse. It’s also about the system itself, and there are details and nuances in the film to show that this system is actually collapsing.

We’re experiencing a renaissance of the traditional courtroom drama – look at Anatomy of a Fall [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Justine Triet
film profile], which won the Palme d’Or this year. What appealed to you about the courtroom setting and the genre conventions it creates?
To be honest, I never thought that I wanted to make a courtroom drama or work specifically in this genre. And I was even not aware of some of the recent films. In a country like Turkey, the courtrooms and courthouse law are things in our daily life. In other countries, people don't need to think as much about the economy or justice or whatever. And as a person who is aware of what's going on around me, I was affected by what else has been happening in recent years.

The two characters are from different classes, and she's trying to help him. There are specific emotions in the locations that affect you immediately. In a hospital, someone is going to die, or not. And in court, someone might go to jail – intense emotions are triggered. So I carry the audience from courthouse to hospital and back, and do not show any private place at all. Maybe we can consider Canan’s car as one, but that doesn't even belong to her.