Empathy for the obsession
"10 to 11" is a slow, pleasurable film about an old collector who has spent his life storing and registering everything that surrounded him.
A shot from "10 to 11"
Mithat Bey is about eighty. He lives in an obscure flat in a suburb of Istanbul. His pragmatic neighbour makes plans to demolish the whole house and replace it with a new one, safer and modern. Bey doesn't believe it to be necessary. And he's got papers to prove it from an engineer of the city council. Nothing can change his mind, as the matter is personal. The demolition would mean he'd have to move his collection. And the collection is as huge as his life is long.
His defiance and the way he patiently follows his own way of living, ignoring others' opinions, is what defines him as a person. He's always well prepared in matters that he cares about. And he's extremely successful in living the life he chose for himself. But his character is also his curse. His wife left him after, having been given a choice between herself and the collection, he picked the latter.
What's interesting, Mithat does not really collect anything concrete like stamps of coins. In his collection one could find old newspapers (not skipping a single issue), series of encyclopedias, letters he wrote and received, tapes with recordings of his countless conversations or even backup copies of the gifts he bought for the people he cared for. What he creates is not quite a collection, at least inh a traditional sense. It's rather a complete registry of his life.
"10 to 11" is a portrayal of an original man who dared to live as he pleased. Mithat's life is contrasted with the life of his caretaker, a man of no interests and no ambition, always busy with things that have no importance. Ali leads quite a regular life, the life of many others. But when he sits next to Mithat and they both drink Russian vodka, we unexpectedly begin to pity him for his boring, pathetic existence.
Esmer's film is challenging. Not much happens and there is no traditional plot. It has a documentary feeling and the fact it's inspired by a true story of the director's uncle, makes that feeling even stronger. It may also seem too long (it lasts almost two hours) and unspectacular to some. To me, however, it was a very touching manifesto of individuality and a desperate need of an aim. The fact that the main character is practically a mirror image of my grandfather, who with a similar passion, although on a different field, patiently realizes his life goals, completely misunderstood by those who surround him, adds a personal note for me to this complex character study. And it also may be that I simply feel comradeship with Mithat because I must have inherited some of his character's features, through my grandpa (currently 84, now finishing building his second house, with his own hands). Or at least I certainly hope so.
"10 do 11" won the ON AIR contest of 8. International Film Festival TOFIFEST, which took place in June 2010 in Torun, Poland. It also received multiple prizes on IFF Istanbul 2009, Adana Golden Boll Film Festival 2009 and Rotterdam Film Festival 2009.
"10 to 11" - film poster