Forms of Forgetting

We only see Nesrin and Erdem once on camera, in the 12-minute shot of the two of them sitting on the steps of a stone amphitheatre. They talk about their relationship, they talk about how they broke up, neither of them remember things quite the same. The two of them also talk over the conversation in voice-over, as if holding a discussion in four dimensions; they already remember things they had forgotten about that specific situation, just two years before. They talk over other images as well, the frozen lake with the hole cut in the ice, the shipyard that once housed a prison, the ruined city of stone, the greenhouse and the forest, the new museum that will show this film once before it disappears from the screen for 14 years, love leaves the mind and re-enters it at will; everything else does too, in too many ways to describe. But there are other images too, the ones that reason without words, the flat being gutted, the hide of the elephant, the laptop screen in the dark. Nesrin recalls what Marc Auge once said, although not word for word: “Forgetting and remembering are not completely opposite things. Because one exists, the other is possible.” (Berlinale)