Yaşar Güney Yurdakul’s short film One Night Away tells the story of Seher, a girl living in Hatay, one of the cities hit hardest by the 2023 earthquakes in Türkiye, which killed more than 50,000 people and wiped out dozens of cities. Seher dreams of becoming a musician. She is constantly listening to drum rhythms through her earphones, and she plays a handmade drum set built from plastic buckets that she has arranged in the trunk of a scrapped car. She lives with her family in one of the container homes where the state has temporarily housed people who lost their homes. Even her high school is nothing more than a tiny container, and the shops where she buys what she needs are tiny containers too. This is all that remains of a city that once had high-rise apartment buildings towering on every side: one enormous caravan park. Seher wants to pass the university entrance exam and escape these harsh living conditions by moving to Istanbul. But one day before the exam, which is held only once a year, she loses the admission document she needs to sit for it. In Türkiye, we read news every year about thousands of young people who are turned away at the exam hall by officials because they forgot or lost this document. Not wanting to become one of them, Seher rides her bicycle through a city that is nothing but rubble on the eve of the exam, searching for the missing document.
At its core, the film tackles a very good premise for a short: the story of a character racing against time. The drum rhythm that accompanies you in the background signals from the start that this will be a dynamic story. And although it tells a bleak story about the people the earthquake left behind, the film does the opposite of what you would expect: its vivid cinematography and color palette fill you with hope and a love of life.
But to be honest, for the first time in a long while, I finished a film and didn’t know what to think about it. A lot happens to Seher throughout the film, and just as she loses hope and realizes she will never find the admission document, her mother, who has come looking for her because she is late getting home, shows her the document in her hand. They look at each other and smile.
It really shouldn’t be this way, because the film has very good dialogue. The performances are so natural that it feels as though you are watching a snippet from a series that has been running for three seasons. Yet all of these positive qualities fail to tell us what the film is actually about. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying, “I didn’t get it, so it’s bad.” On the contrary, it has just one flaw, and that single flaw is enough to make all of its other strengths seem insignificant.
A short film is the art of fitting entire worlds into a limited running time, and One Night Away ends abruptly, as if someone cut you off mid-sentence. You can’t even grasp what just happened. To be fair, it has beautiful themes, such as a young girl’s dreams, her relationship with her mother, and life in the midst of an earthquake’s aftermath, as well as metaphors that invite reflection, like the flashlight she gave her boyfriend reappearing in the finale. But at its foundation, it lacks the words that carry you to a conclusion.
As I mentioned, another praiseworthy aspect of the film is its performances. The greatest praise must go to Nila Yari, who plays Seher. I don’t think I have seen such a good female lead in a film in a long time. From her gaze and manner to her tone of voice, she has a strange energy and star quality that makes you feel you are watching a real person rather than a character. We shouldn’t be surprised if one day we see her become a major actress.
