The Hoarder

The Hoarder (Garip) is the story of a young man living with his mother in a suburban neighbourhood. He has obsessive-compulsive disorder and collects objects of the people he meets. He is pushed around and intimated by people around him. He is also in love with a young woman and wants to show this to her. We watch his story through a series of objects he shows us in the one bedroom apartment he lives. Each object leads to a flashback where we get an aspect of the story and a conflict is revealed between the main character and others. In the end the hoarder gains his self-respect and rebels against the oppression he experiences. He peacefully accepts the consequences of his actions. There is a surprise ending.I have taken five characters form the feature film I wrote and gave them live in this short. I grew up in a 1970s neighbourhood in Istanbul. There was a particularly interesting person I met everyday going to school. I believe he had a neurological disorder that made him smile all the time. Children were scared of him but I said hello to him everyday. In the feature screenplay I wrote (titled Rise and Fall) this character is given only one scene where he is a minor character. In the short he is the main character. I am a bit like this character. I like to collect stuff or clean up and reorder objects in my office when my mind is focused on a project. The rest of the film evolved from three key visuals involving three objects. I assigned each object a link to a character and an event and wanted to reveal each piece of the puzzle through a series of flashbacks involving that object. I was also inspired by some of the visuals from films like Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia and Mustafa Altioklar’s Cholera Street along with a most successful 2012 short film by my former student Abdurrahman Oner’s film Vanished into Blue.