Director: Deniz Akçay | Turkey | Fiction | 2013 | 81 mins
Film source: Mars Productions
Turkish filmmaker Deniz Akçay’s feature debut is a delicately nuanced depiction of a dysfunctional family, featuring uniformly strong performances from its ensemble cast. Nurcan is a widow who compulsively cleans the house on a daily basis in an obsessive attempt to manufacture an ordered home life. Feride, her grown daughter still living at home, is torn between familial duties and her fear of becoming a spinster. Then there’s Ilker, at 17 the de facto man of house, who escapes the pressures of imminent adulthood by skipping school and getting high—when he isn’t sleeping with his best friend’s mother, that is. Semi-autobiographical (Akçay’s father died when she was 16), Nobody’s Home deconstructs the patriarchal hierarchy of a traditional Turkish family within a compact narrative which balances the messiness of heated domestic drama with splashes of understated humor and tenderness. Winner of the People’s Choice Award at the 2013 Istanbul International Film Festival, Nobody’s Home is an impressive opening statement from a young writer-director who appears poised for future international success.