Seeing at the Forum section of the 55th Berlinale, where my second film "Angel's Fall" had its world premiere in February 2005, how some directors look upon their own provincial towns opened new horizons for me.

Soon after my return home, I started writing about the Anatolian provinces; the short stories I wrote created a trilogy. The three, feature-length films will be titled Honey, Milk and Egg. I intend to begin the shooting with Egg, the third chronological story in the trilogy. The films will be shown in reverse order, i.e, as Egg, Honey and Milk.

What I'm looking at here is a longish cinematographic flash-back. Call it an internal journey, if you will, towards the authentic and away from the globalising face and appearance of the world's provinces. For it is in our provinces that the feeling of time, so eroded by civilisation, still clings.

This will also be something of an archaeological dig, extending from the last days of the mother-son relationship (with the death of the mother in Egg) to the beginning (the birth of the son in Honey). I hope in this way to narrate the burden and pain of passing time so that I may be able to invite everyone to remember and think about his own time. We all have mothers we love and it is highly possible that much is hidden in the time we spent with our mothers, and the time we are no longer able to spend with them.

I wish to note that my films are not only bound to the story, that is, the screenplay. I am of the view that time is the raw material of cinema. My expression is plain, spare in dialogue, shaped by visual and audio details and focused on conveying the sense of time passing with every breath.

Semih Kaplanoğlu

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