Salvation: a relentless political fable (review)

In the South-East of Turkey, two neighboring communities are fighting over territory, to the point of genocidal madness. A film full of fantasy and westerns and a new success from Emin Alper.

Film after film, Emin Alper establishes himself as a filmmaker who counts. After the selection of the thriller Burning Days for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2022, Salvation received the Silver Bear at the Berlin festival at the beginning of the year. A prize awarded by the president of the jury Wim Wenders, who disappointed a lot of people by declaring at the opening of the event that cinema had to “stay out of politics”. However, ten days later, his results expressed exactly the opposite. Because Salvation is clearly a film that has things to say about politics. And who says them – that’s why we give him awards – in a totally cinematic way.

If Emin Alper was inspired for Salvation by a very real tragedy (a massacre that occurred in a village in Turkish Kurdistan in 2009), the Western framework of his film, almost mythological, immediately gives it a universal dimension. Two rival communities look at each other here like earthenware dogs. One lives in a village perched on a hill, the other in the valley below. Soon, the residents above, who feel economically wronged, will be hysterized by the head of a paramilitary organization posing as a religious leader.

Alper intends to question fanaticism, genocidal violence, down to its most indecipherable roots. So he plunges into the irrational, into the delirious dreams of his characters, during scenes on the edge of the fantastic, where the fascinating intertwining of alleys of the village which serves as his setting turns into a mental maze. He is a filmmaker as gifted at making people feel the concreteness of the world he depicts, this territory of rocks and dust, as its secret, dreamlike, almost hallucinatory dimension. A filmmaker who counts, yes.

By Emin Alper. With Caner Cindoruk, Berkay Ates, Feyyaz Duman… Duration: 2 hours. Released September 2, 2026