Men on the Bridge: An Interview with Asli Ozge

I first met Asli Ozge when we both showed our debut features at the Istanbul Film Festival in 2003. Since then Ozge has become one of Turkish cinema’s brightest young stars. Her award-winning film Koprudekiler (Men on the Bridge) is currently playing MoMA, after an intensely successful run on the international festival circuit and distribution around the world. It’s a remarkable hybrid of documentary and narrative, following the lives of several men who work on a bridge across the Bosphorus in Istanbul. We seem them both in their work and in their private lives – creating an intoxicatingly intimate atmosphere that nevertheless has broader resonances. Because, ultimately, we’re watching not just three men’s lives on one bridge, but an entire nation’s in-between existence -- one perched between East and West. Ozge was in town recently, and I sat down with her to discuss her new film, her unique method of working, and the Turkish film landscape in general.

Forgotten Films: The Stranger (Luchino Visconti, 1967)

(For an explanation of the Forgotten Films project, go here.)

Forgive me for a second if this gets a bit personal. (Don’t worry -- not that personal.)

The other day, while suffering from a rather grotesque bout of food-poisoning, I found myself thinking back to the last time I’d been similarly laid low. And, amazingly, I could remember the exact date: I'm pretty sure it was November 27, 1997. Newly returned from nearly a year in Russia, I had just cooked myself a surprisingly delicious Thanksgiving meal of Georgian chakhokhbili and was now suffering from the even-more-surprising and previously unbeknownst-to-me fact that the chicken had been thawed and refrozen before I’d gotten to it. Worse: The following day MoMA was having a very rare screening of Luchino Visconti’s The Stranger, a film I’d been trying desperately to see since the age of thirteen, and the reason I'd chosen to remain in New York during Thanksgiving in the first place.