The Alchemist

Winter Sleep

A few weeks ago I watched the Turkish movie Winter Sleep. It was long! Took me a few days to finish.

There are two language barriers here - first, the translation from Turkish to English, which inevitably loses some nuances; second, English isn’t my first language, so I didn’t dwell too much on details of some long dialogs at the time.

But this movie keeps coming back to me recently. Aydın's character - his history, his lifestyle, his relationship with Nihal, his pride, his darker side, his candid self-reflection - has become increasingly relatable to me.

Now it seems to me someone had open themself so deeply, that I caught a glimpse of the abyss and has been dizzy ever since. That kind of tension in society, or rather, that level of adversity, is not normal in western movies - let alone Netflix nowadays.

Yet, it is something I am too familiar with. I wonder if that's part of my struggle - being surrounded by a society that's more advanced (developed, individualistic, diverse, inclusive) than the one I grew up in, I might be overprotecting myself. The defenses I developed were suited in China, but no longer fit here?