9/10
More Than A Hotel: Motherland
30 June 2007
A three stories, fourteen rooms manor facing the street that leads from station square to main street of the city (indeed Manisa). Once built on the Greek neighbourhood by great grandfather of Zebercet (Olivine). Luckily rescued from the fire of 1922. But after that, the family decides to move to Izmir and the father of Zebercet insists on turning it into a hotel. Zebercet, the clerk and present owner of the hotel after his father, born in 1930 in the big room (now No.1) in the ground floor (now the lobby).

One day a beautiful woman stays there one night and leaves to "visit again within a week or so" and Zebercet starts to wait for this unknown but seemingly long-waited woman who came with delayed Ankara train, as he has been waiting this Kafkaesque manor and the dead. He keeps waiting for her. He gradually loses track of daily life. And hotel goes into a deterioration as if implying psychological decline of its proprietor.

This based-on-a-novel film is the most striking story of loneliness, alienation and depression in Turkish cinema. It tells the conflict of individual in a repressive society, sexual isolation and distortion of personality.
17 out of 19 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed