A Film a Week - Empire of the Rabbits / Tavşan imparatorlugu

 previously published on Cineuropa

Sometimes, life seems like an endless cycle of oppression and abuse. The powerful oppress those who are not, parents exploit their children, people abuse animals, hound dogs chase rabbits, kids bully and are bullied at school. All of that, set in the environment of rural Turkey, can be observed in Seyfettin Tokmak’s touching feature Empire of the Rabbits, which just premiered in the official competition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Teenage boy Musa (newcomer Alpay Kaya) lives with his father Beko (Sermet Yeşil of Kosmos fame) in extreme poverty. Their only income comes from the father’s shady odd jobs, which include hound dog races with a live rabbit and illegal betting run by local gangster Muzaffer (Kubilay Tunçer, glimpsed in Nuri Bilge Çeylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and The Wild Pear Tree). He also runs a scheme with a school where he is principal: the students have to pretend that they have special needs, so Muzaffer can take donations. Beko comes up with a solution to enrol Musa in Muzaffer’s school, hoping that he could eventually get some state support for his “disabled” child, while Musa also has to take some "private lessons" in faking disability from Muzaffer’s daughter Nergis (Perla Palamutçuoğullari, another newcomer).

Misunderstood, neglected and often abused at home by his harsh, self-centred father and bullied at school, Musa is actually a gentle, noble soul, spending all his time saving rabbits from his father’s traps and taking them to his special, secret and safe place in a cave where he tries to build them an empire. Once he shows Nergis his ecosystem, she joins forces with him. But can the corrupt system be mended by the power of pure goodness? Could it at least be crashed?

Writer-director Tokmak comes from a background of filmmaking and TV directing, but also film theory and activism, which might explain why The Empire of the Rabbits is a well thought-through film with layers of metaphors, analogies and parallels painting the picture of a life in extremely harsh conditions. Focusing on the state of things, he deliberately relegates the story to the backseat, so the plot seems to be running in circles, slowly. Seemingly acting intuitively, based on the emotions of particular scenes, editor Vladimir Gojun eventually manages to establish some sense of continuity and rhythm, which was necessary for a film that could be, on the level of the atmosphere, very unpleasant and demanding for the viewer.

On a purely audiovisual level, however, Empire of the Rabbits offers a lot of poetry, thanks to the evocative cinematography by Claudia Becerril Bulos who shoots the vast landscapes with little to no human presence and crumbling, bare-bones interiors in naturally murky colours, almost without any artificial lighting and in an intimate hand-held mode. The film audio landscape complements the visuals and becomes a tool for dramaturgy, since the dialogues are quite scarce. The ever-present sound design of wind howling and the music by Erkan Oğur paint the picture of Musa’s inner life with more gentle notes, while it also ramps up the tension when needed.

In the end, Empire of the Rabbits is a very dark film, but with its heart in the right place. The harshness of the world it depicts is quite sobering, while the inherent goodness of its young characters signals that there is still some hope left.