DEAD HORSE NEBULA

Entrenched in Turkish cinema traditions though entirely its own, Tarik Aktaş’ feature debut DEAD HORSE NEBULA is either a real or imagined childhood memory of adults attempting to remove the body of a dead horse from an open field. What follows is a string of encounters between humans and the natural world — to eat, to labor and to progress — tasks often mediated by large quantities of rope, where the drawn-out, human effort is continually, at times comically, coupled with the threat of bodily endangerment. Winner of the Locarno Film Festival prize for Best Emerging Director, this existential fever dream is a transformative experience, a distillation of the extraordinary suspense of day-to-day existence. – Malin Kan