Change of perspective

When Directors, Script Writer and Executive Producer Ayşe Polat was travelling in Istanbul in 2015, she encountered the demonstrating Saturday Mothers near Taksim Square. Their sons were abducted in the 1990s and never reappeared. "That really moved me a lot - for me it looked like a wound that had been open for a long time," says Polat, who lives in Hamburg. This experience was the starting point for her new film: in "In the Blind Spot", a German film team visits a remote village in north-eastern Turkey. Here they witness how an elderly woman keeps the memory of her missing son alive through a ritual that is never performed. What the German film team does not know is that they are already in the crosshairs of a shady organisation that wants to cover up the disappearance.

In order to show the story from both the victim's and the perpetrator's point of view, the 52-year-old Director tells the story in three chapters from different perspectives - in the truest sense of the word: the footage from an ARRI camera is skilfully interwoven with mobile phone footage and images from several surveillance cameras. "Based on the found footage genre, there are always gaps that the viewers have to fill in themselves," says Polat. The film was shot in a small town in north-east Turkey for around 40 days during the coronavirus pandemic in 2021 - but rehearsals took place in Hamburg. The team rented a small flat here to test the different cameras and their modes of operation with Hamburg-based Director of Photography Patrick Orth. The main actors also travelled to Hamburg for the rehearsals. Fun fact: There was also a real day of filming on the Reeperbahn - which unfortunately didn't make it into the final film. Instead, the entire post production took place on the Elbe afterwards.

Anyone watching "In the Blind Spot" for the first time will inevitably ask themselves the genre question - because in this case it's not so easy to answer. The film starts out as a social drama and gradually transforms into a thriller over the course of the plot, which is also peppered with mystery elements. The second and third chapters of the film focus on seven-year-old Melek and her father Zafer, who works for the aforementioned sinister organisation. While Zafer feels more and more uncomfortable with his job and develops paranoid traits, the girl seems to have psychic abilities and knows things that she can't actually know. When she stares directly at the camera with a fixed gaze, one is inevitably reminded of horror classics such as "The Shining". "The casting for the child role took a good year. In the end, we decided in favour of Cagla Yurga - she can hold the gaze for an extremely long time, which really impressed me. She did a really great job and we are still in contact," says Polat. Ahmet Varli, Nihan Okutucu and Berlin actress Aybi Era can also be seen in other leading roles.

"In the Blind Spot" will have its premiere at the Berlinale in the relatively new "Encounters" section - a fitting place for Polat's genre mix. "I was delighted to be accepted. And the section is just right for us - it shows formats that are aesthetically a little different," says the Director. A strong mix that will definitely not disappear into the Berlinale audience's blind spot.