Chickens in Turkey

In a sun‑bleached Anatolian village where the clatter of poultry mingles with the whisper of ancient minarets, Marcel Perez’s "Chickens in Turkey" unfurls as a lyrical meditation on displacement, identity, and the absurdity of bureaucratic inertia. The narrative orbits around Aylin (Dorothy Earle), a widowed schoolteacher whose modest homestead becomes the unlikely epicenter of a governmental edict: the compulsory relocation of the town’s chicken population to a newly sanctioned industrial farm. Pierre Collosse embodies the officious yet conflicted inspector Mehmet, tasked with enforcing the decree while wrestling with his own nostalgia for rural simplicity. Flo Bailey delivers a nuanced performance as Leyla, Aylin’s rebellious teenage daughter, whose clandestine nocturnal escapades with the hens become a subversive act of resistance. Marcel Perez, also the screenwriter, weaves a tapestry of intergenerational dialogue, interspersed with flash‑forwards to a speculative future where the chickens, now mechanized, serve as symbols of state‑engineered progress. The film’s structure is deliberately fragmented: scenes dissolve into static tableaux reminiscent of Ottoman miniatures, punctuated by long takes that linger on the feathered protagonists, allowing their mundane motions to assume a mythic resonance. As the villagers convene in the town square, debates erupt over the ethics of animal commodification, echoing broader sociopolitical anxieties. The climax erupts when a clandestine midnight exodus, orchestrated by Leyla and a sympathetic Mehmet, leads the flock across the Bosphorus, culminating in a surreal tableau where the chickens perch upon the rusted hull of an abandoned ferry, silhouetted against a bruised sunrise. The denouement refrains from tidy resolution; instead, it offers a lingering tableau of Aylin watching the horizon, her gaze reflecting both loss and an indomitable hope, suggesting that the true emancipation lies not in the chickens’ physical freedom but in the reclamation of agency by those who have been silenced.