The Banishment

During my childhood in a village located in the Hakkari Province in Turkey, I experienced many events that illustrated how geographical conditions played an incredibly significant role in the transformation of the societal structure. Undoubtedly, the most significant of these events was the passing away of my father in February 1988 during an avalanche. During that time, despite the efforts of many people joining the search party from surrounding villages my father could not be found on the first day, and at the end of the second day a mute and deaf man who was from a neighboring village, discovered the location of my father’s body. Another important event from my childhood, which happened during the early 1990s, was what happened to a young man who had been banished from his village because of a disgraceful crime he committed and then had to walk all the way to in order to try to reach the center of the city. While the death of my father changed the relationship I had with the geography I lived in; the story of the young man banished who - because of the geographic conditions - had to walk through the surrounding villages despite the imminent risk of getting lynched, taught me the close relationship between Nature and society.

The Banishment, which carries deep traces from these bitter experiences, focuses on the relationship between nature and society through different stories that intersect in the final act of the film. These two stories that enfold in the same geography, follow how a mute and deaf man and a sleepwalker named Ziko (30) meet in the wrong place and the wrong time. Just like Ziko, The deaf and mute hunter, is forced to hit the same road in the dead of the winter in a brutal geography.

However, even though the villagers who have acted upon a traditional judicial mechanism have sentenced Ziko with a punishment , the definitions of concepts such as crime and punishment remain obscure since rhetoric become a powerful weapon of defense and argument. In fact, the sentence of Ziko’s banishment, which cannot be delayed any longer, will be executed by Nature itself, however the one who will be punished in the end will be the deaf and mute hunter.