The Consensus

Uzlaşma, 1991
Director: Oğuzhan Tercan
Writers: Oğuzhan Tercan & Sabahattin Çetin
Cast: Halil Ergun, Berhan Şimşek, Nur Sürer, Kutay Köktürk, Salih Kalyon, Reis Çelik

Although Oğuzhan Tercan’s first feature-length film Uzlaşma (The Consensus) is about the 1979 murder of journalist Abdi İpekçi, it approaches its subject not as a documentary but rather through the device of a meta-movie that remains faithful to the realities of the story that it seeks to relate. Actor Berhan Şimşek receives an offer to play Mehmet Ali Ağca, the hitman who killed İpekçi, in a movie. Before he can undertake the role however, he must himself come to resemble Ağca. Revealing a masterful understanding of the grammar of cinema, Uzlaşma draws the viewer into a carefully constructed world in which fact and fiction as well as past and present are all proffered in transparent, overlapping layers without ever becoming abstract.