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| Director Nadir Saribacak |
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| co-writer/actor Ayhan Hülagü |
GAZELLE B USA (103 mi) 2025 d: Nadir Saribacak co-director: Samy Pioneer
Exile is only the beginning.
Nadir Saribacak is one of the co-founders of studio garage, a New Jersey–based Turkish-American group producing work for both American and Turkish audiences, creating original film and theater projects rooted in an original narrative form that brings together storytelling, puppetry, and visual imagination, while also offering acting classes shaped by its own artistic approach. Believing that theater is a “laboratory,” he describes his work as “carefully removing each layer of the character,” emphasizing that he has learned from each layer, writing the script while he was driving a taxi at night, accentuating his ability to handle complex, demanding characters while emphasizing his talent in avoiding stereotypes. Making his first feature, the writer/director/lead actor is known for his performance in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (Kis uykusu) (2014), winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Reminiscent of the early Dardennes Brothers movie LA PROMESSE (1996), which deals with exploited undocumented immigrants, this is an immigration-themed drama inspired by lived experiences of exile and displacement, as the film unfolds as an intimate psychological drama of separation, resilience, and the fragile terrain of a separated family. Co-directed by Samy Pioneer, who also edits, written by Saribacak and Ayhan Hülagü, one of only a handful of living artists trained in traditional Turkish theater, while shot by Danish cinematographer Lasse Ulvedal Tolbøll, the film puts the director front and center as the lead character, telling the poignant story of Yakup (Nadir Saribacak), an educated man, a devoted father and beloved music teacher who leaves his wife Ayşe (Emine Bayindir) and five-year-old daughter Neşe (Sarah Aydogan) behind to seek refuge in the United States to avoid arrest from the political unrest in Turkey. Finding himself alone and undocumented, determined to bring his family to safety, he starts a new life in New York, largely defined by working in the cramped quarters of a kabob kitchen with other undocumented immigrants, always seen in confined spaces, where they all share similar circumstances. Opening in a mosque in New York, the Imam tells the congregation the well-known tale of the gazelle from folklore, recalling the story of the pregnant animal facing predators and hunters, which serves as a powerful metaphor for the extreme emotional and physical hardships he is forced to endure. As the Imam preaches, we see the pain etched on Yakup’s face, accompanied by the background sounds of his terrifying journey from Turkey to Greece on a crowded boat, a pivotal moment that powerfully frames the tragedy into which the character finds himself.
Tens of thousands of people in Turkey were forced into exile, where Yakup is just one among many, as his world has been turned upside down, with the film balancing the hopes of the future against the horrors of the past, which have a way of creeping into the present. In the United States, the system is so broken that it breeds predators, making the lives of desperate people susceptible to even more terrible tragedies. He is told right away that legal reunification could take years, leaving Yakup torn between waiting and taking the risk of illegal migration. To fund the journey, he works multiple jobs while secretly arranging with a smuggler. At work, he shares heartbreaking moments on his phone via video calls, having to endure hearing his wife’s tears while also trying to teach his daughter a song for her upcoming school concert, as he struggles to find time at work to rehearse singing “You Are My Sunshine,” CHRISTINA PERRI - YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE [Lyric Video] YouTube (1:23). Fortunately he is surrounded by a community of immigrants, many of whom have already gone through what he’s experiencing in bringing their families to America, offering him a supportive perspective while pursuing the American Dream, but it’s a harrowing ordeal for his family, whose scared and threatened lives are crumbling without him, as they really have no support system. This drives him to desperation, where these endless sacrifices he’s forced to make strain his mental health, causing a huge physical and psychological toll. While migration provides the backdrop, this is clearly a human story, a psychological drama where the rhythm of the film is established by regular patterns at mind-numbing work, social interactions with coworkers, and the latest updates on his quest to smuggle his family out of Turkey, whose lives are placed in even greater danger as the Turkish police close in for questioning. Ayşe seems unwilling to risk their daughter’s life in attempting such a dangerous passage at sea, but they seem to have little choice, with Yakup urging her to understand that paying smugglers for help in their desperate escape may be the only way, but she’s not convinced. Part of what works is how the story is told, as we see how agitated Yakup is most of the time, trying to stay calm, but always having to endure seemingly endless setbacks, as frustration mounts with each passing day, while the family abroad is barely seen on the phone, but we hear them, often repeating the phrase, “We’re fine, don't worry,” yet viewers know otherwise, and can only infer what they’re actually going through.
Mostly shot in a social realist style, the film describes the deep pain caused by displacement, the uncertainty of migration, and the effort to hold on to hope, but the quickly unraveling circumstances leads Yakup to take a second job, the well-paid but physically exhausting demand of working with marble as a stone mason, all in an attempt to pay the high price for smugglers to get his family out of Turkey. Co-writer Ayhan Hülagü has a dual role in front of the camera, playing Adem, a former student of Yakup’s in Turkey, who is also his immigration lawyer and confidante in New York. Yakup is simply overwhelmed by things he cannot control, confused and disheartened by the lack of legal options, while completely exhausted by the neverending cycle of work and his pressing need to earn money fast, literally consumed by the lack of options, losing a grip on his unsettling inner world, so he’s not always thinking clearly. The pace of the film increasingly ratchets up the tension, using an unsettling sound design that becomes ominously intense, while veering into unnecessary melodrama near the end that is a stark difference from the realist aesthetic, feeling forced and overly contrived when it all tragically comes together at the exact same moment in time, increasingly raising the stakes, heightening the extreme drama, where it appears designed to tug at the heartstrings. When you employ shady smuggling operators, things rarely go as planned. Add to that the precariousness of escaping refugees, and the harrowing journey that awaits them, where any number of things could go wrong, as accidental deaths are a regular occurrence. Viewers are immersed in the hopelessness that Yakup feels at such a distance, halfway across the world, unable to intervene when things invariably go wrong, feeling mentally and physically battered from all sides, where just like the mythical folk tale told at the beginning, gazelles rarely escape their predators. It’s a cautionary tale, disturbing and psychologically unnerving, yet it places an issue that is dominating the headlines directly in front of viewers, providing a human face, a nuanced and compelling figure who is trying to do all the right things, but he’s caught up in a web of dehumanizing confusion where the conventional immigration system is already cluttered with bureaucratic red tape, causing heartbreaking setbacks and delays, which only places family members that stay behind in even greater peril. To those that disappear, we simply never hear from them again. What this films reveals is how trauma transforms people, eloquently painting a bleak picture with no easy answers, bringing desperate lives into focus, while offering a visceral understanding of the life or death stakes involved.
