As a teenager, Turkish auteur Zeki Demirkubuz was imprisoned on political charges, and during his three-year stretch discovered Western literature. Dostoevsky’s novels in particular inspired him
when he turned to filmmaking, and this bleak 2012 drama references the Russian master’s Notes from the Underground. Engin Gunaydin
(who also appeared in Demirkubuz’s 2001 film Yazgi) is frighteningly persuasive as a bored civil servant and failed writer who snaps when an old colleague wins a prestigious award for a novel about urban angst. A bravura sequence in an Ankaran restaurant is reminiscent of the banquet scene in Roy Andersson’s You, the Living; indeed, Demirkubuz shares the Swedish director’s affinity for desaturated color, pregnant pauses, and deadpan performances. In Turkish with subtitles.