04/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: Turkey's Selman Nacar confirms the extent of his potential thanks to a legal and intimate thriller with a script that knows very well how to hide its hand and of a sharp social realism

“For justice to manifest itself fully, I invite you to think about it before passing judgement.” Very much noticed in 2021 with his first feature Between Two Dawns [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Selman Nacar
film profile], Selman Nacar is already back with a new opus just as well made, Hesitation Wound [+see also:
trailer
interview: Selman Nacar
film profile], screened in the Orizzonti competition of the 80th Venice Film Festival. All while once again digging into questions of ethics, morality, personal conscience, the grey zones between truth and lies, ambitions and renunciation, the Turkish director paints, with very realistic small touches, the portrait of a country taking on water. He also demonstrates a formidable sense of suspense and effects of surprise that his protagonist, the stubborn lawyer Canan (Tülin Özen), will experience to her own expense, in a quasi permanent reconsideration of all her certainties, her who likes nothing more than controlling every situation.

It’s trial day in the small courtroom of Uşak (a town in the heart of Turkey, on the road connecting Izmir and Ankara). At dawn, a penitentiary van left the jail, transporting the accused Musa (Oğulcan Arman Uslu). Canan, who handles his defence, arrives directly from the hospital where she is keeping watch, taking turns day and night with her sister Belgin (Gülçin Kültür Şahin), their mother plunged in a coma and for whom begins to arise the painful question (rejected by Canan) of stopping the machines and of donating organs.

Proud and very determined (“I will fight till the end”), the young lawyer, who graduated in the United Kingdom and the only woman amongst men in this legal space, prepares for the audience a closed off client who prefers to listen to sombre local rap (“the wittiest win, stop grovelling and ending your life… sorrow will eat you up, the price to pay will never end, we don’t dream of such a place, we don’t have the right to make a mistake”). We don’t know yet what he’s been accused of, but Canan is confident, betting on strangely erased office CCTV footage and a previously unseen witness. When the latter doesn’t show up and thanks to an accidental postponement of the hearing for a few hours, she sets out to find him…

Skilfully distilling micro-clues that will be used much later in the plot, Selman Nacar stuffs his film with deceptive information and half-truths in a very subtle variation of nuances and moods that gradually sketch out the individual and collective portrait (of a woman, a family, a legal system, different social classes, morals, etc.) of a profound breakdown. All these elements are perfectly interwoven and masked in an envelope of thriller and mystery, making the writer-director an expert in detection and a name to watch very closely in the future.

Hesitation Wound was produced by Turkish outfits Fol Sinema, Karma Films and Kuyu Film, co-produced by their colleagues of TRT, BKM Mutfak and Sev Yapim, as well as Spain's Nephilim, Romania's Point Film and France's Arizona Films. US' Magnolia Pictures International is handling international sales.

(Translated from French)