Europe’s elderly in a Turkish short
Güncelleme Tarihi:
by Vercihan Ziflioğlu
Oluşturulma Tarihi: Mart 20, 2009 00:00
ISTANBUL - A short film, ’Kiralık’ (For Rent) features the West's lone elderly population from the perspective of young Turkish filmmakers. The film’s director Emre Karapınar says the old spend the last years of their lives lonely in the West.
As technology drives youth to be antisocial, elderly people are left to face loneliness and their own fate because of weak family relations, says a screenwriter whose short film script on the subject won a Turkish Ministry of Culture competition.
Emre Karapınar, whose parents divorced when he was a child, was sent to Vienna alone for education. His biggest dream was to have a happy family, but it has never come true. He has tried to satisfy this longing with his neighbors. Marianna, his 70-year-old next-door neighbor of Serbian origin, has become like family to Karapınar.
Karapınar, who studied cinema at universities in Vienna and Istanbul, has observed that there are many old and lonely people living in his surroundings. The turning point for him came when he saw a newspaper story about a man whose death was recognized only seven years later.
Research in other countries
Considering his own world of loneliness, Karapınar decided to write a short film script for this story with İsmail Onay, one of his university friends. The two friends co-wrote a short script and named it "Kiralık" (For Rent). Karapınar and Onay sent this script to a competition called The Cinema of the Future, sponsored by Turkish Ministry of Culture and organized by the Turkish Foundation for Cinema and Audio-visual Culture, or TÜRSAK. The script won first place in the competition.
Karapınar and Onay not only wrote the script but they also carried out research on elderly people living in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Italy and Australia. Speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review, Karapınar said the following about his long-term work: "The old spend the last years of their lives lonely in the West. Their family ties are too weak and most of them move to a nursing home and die there."
Europe is ’selfish,’ ’materialistic’
Karapınar said even in young families in the West, dialogue with children is based on military-like discipline and order. "Selfishness and materialism are very dense in Europe," he said. Karapınar said he was deeply shaken by a dialogue he read in a textbook while he was visiting Germany for research. "In the box, it read ’Come on children, we are going to visit your grandmother in the nursing home. Excuse us, mother, we could not have visited you for the last four years.’"
The young are also feeling deep loneliness, said Karapınar. "This is really worrisome," he said.
Karapınar said 90 percent of the elderly population is living in nursing homes and pointed out that this ratio was low in Italy and Turkey.
"Elderly people in Europe donate their pensions to nursing homes and live a very happy life under the protection of their state," he said. "In Turkey, however, the elderly who do not have the chance to live with their families struggle for life in nursing homes under bad conditions, lacking many facilities."
’For Rent’
The script is about an elderly woman who needs constant medical care. The doctor suggests that the woman move to a nursing home, but she does not want to leave her home. It has been made into a 15-minute film and describes the woman’s struggle against loneliness while trying to survive.
Emre Karapınar, whose parents divorced when he was a child, was sent to Vienna alone for education. His biggest dream was to have a happy family, but it has never come true. He has tried to satisfy this longing with his neighbors. Marianna, his 70-year-old next-door neighbor of Serbian origin, has become like family to Karapınar.
Karapınar, who studied cinema at universities in Vienna and Istanbul, has observed that there are many old and lonely people living in his surroundings. The turning point for him came when he saw a newspaper story about a man whose death was recognized only seven years later.
Research in other countries
Considering his own world of loneliness, Karapınar decided to write a short film script for this story with İsmail Onay, one of his university friends. The two friends co-wrote a short script and named it "Kiralık" (For Rent). Karapınar and Onay sent this script to a competition called The Cinema of the Future, sponsored by Turkish Ministry of Culture and organized by the Turkish Foundation for Cinema and Audio-visual Culture, or TÜRSAK. The script won first place in the competition.
Karapınar and Onay not only wrote the script but they also carried out research on elderly people living in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Italy and Australia. Speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review, Karapınar said the following about his long-term work: "The old spend the last years of their lives lonely in the West. Their family ties are too weak and most of them move to a nursing home and die there."
Europe is ’selfish,’ ’materialistic’
Karapınar said even in young families in the West, dialogue with children is based on military-like discipline and order. "Selfishness and materialism are very dense in Europe," he said. Karapınar said he was deeply shaken by a dialogue he read in a textbook while he was visiting Germany for research. "In the box, it read ’Come on children, we are going to visit your grandmother in the nursing home. Excuse us, mother, we could not have visited you for the last four years.’"
The young are also feeling deep loneliness, said Karapınar. "This is really worrisome," he said.
Karapınar said 90 percent of the elderly population is living in nursing homes and pointed out that this ratio was low in Italy and Turkey.
"Elderly people in Europe donate their pensions to nursing homes and live a very happy life under the protection of their state," he said. "In Turkey, however, the elderly who do not have the chance to live with their families struggle for life in nursing homes under bad conditions, lacking many facilities."
’For Rent’
The script is about an elderly woman who needs constant medical care. The doctor suggests that the woman move to a nursing home, but she does not want to leave her home. It has been made into a 15-minute film and describes the woman’s struggle against loneliness while trying to survive.