Akın’s latest movie premieres at Cannes

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Fatih Akın made the film in his hometown, Çamburnu, focusing on the polluted areas of Çamburnu villages.

Director Fatih Akın’s new movie, titled “Polluting Paradise,” which focuses on his hometown, the Black Sea province of Trabzons’s Çamburnu district, made its premier at Cannes Film Fest on May 20.

The premiere hosted the Turkish Consul General in Marseille Deniz Erdoğan Barım and Turkey’s Paris Culture and Tourism Adviser Kalbiye Noyan.

The highlight of the premiere night was the DJ performance by the lead actor in “Soul Kitchen,” Greek Adam Bousdoukos. The actor played a variety of music such as folk, rock and techno.

Akın’s parents are also attended the night with the amateur actors. The movie focuses on the polluted areas of Çamburnu villages.

‘He is on the side of the villagers’

“Polluting Paradise” was filmed over the last five years since Akın came to the area to shoot parts of “Edge of Heaven,” and is thus a much more explicit campaigning tool than objective reporting, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It’s evident that Akın is firmly on the side of the villagers in Çamburnu, a picturesque settlement located beneath lush tea-growing slopes.

In 2007 a former copper mine a couple of miles uphill was turned into an enormous landfill for the entire province of Trabzon – amid much local protest, said the article. The opposition has remained vociferous over the years – due partly to the powerful stench emitted by the supposedly “odorless” garbage and, even more economically damaging, the deleterious effect on streams and the water table.

According to the The Hollywood Reporter’s website, often working in collaboration with local historian Bünyamin Seyrekbasan, Akın catalogues the complaints of numerous residents.

Crucially, Akın and his collaborators obtain great access to the site and its surroundings, frequently happening to be in the right place at exactly the right time. They can thus capture the often fraught encounters between the locals and the hapless functionaries tasked with operating and maintaining this deeply unpopular facility – images of which are often given a sinister cast by the thriller-type stylizations of Alexander Hacke’s over-used score.