Capture

Cihan is a former Kurdish political prisoner from Turkey. The daily life he leads today in France does not suggest the scale of the misadventures he went through when he was twenty, which Capture recounts.

The gulf separating the seemingly banal present of his character and a tragic episode in his story is what Jules Cruveiller constantly refreshes through in the structure of Capture, where two stories unfold in parallel. Imagewise, a couple of actors and their young daughter filmed in their daily life; soundwise, a story reminiscent of the tale of Cihan’s past. Playing more or less plainly on echoes, the scenes comment the text directly or obliquely, prolonging the evocative power of the spoken word. Mental images abound, relating to the experience of a man jailed for several years and forced to conjure up in his imagination an absent world. Jules Cruveiller never attempts to create the illusion of plenitude—what interests him is precisely this rift in an existence and the way that fiction has infiltrated it. First, the fiction that the Turkish justice system had to create to sentence a man—a student at the time—to eleven and a half years of imprisonment on no evidence. Then the fiction that the Turkish population and media created to combat this injustice and forge a Cihan more able to move the crowds. The filmmaker acknowledges this fiction-in-the-making by using actors who we project onto the story, whereas the real protagonist remains shrouded in mystery. Beyond the extraordinary story that it archives, the film touches on a universal truth: several existences cohabit within us, and wherever we go, we carry something invisible.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian