Parents' Guide to Cici

In CICI, young Kadir is moody and has a mean streak. It doesn't help that his father, Bekir (Yilmaz Edogan), refers to him as "useless." When Bekir takes in a friend's orphaned nephew -- the grateful, polite, hardworking, and capable Cemil -- Kadir seems to think his place in the family hierarchy is threatened. Bekir catches him bullying the new boy and does to Kadir exactly what was done to Cemil. In a public humiliation, Bekir hoses Kadir until he's drenched. He films the ordeal on a video camera and then leaves Kadir to stand out in the cold night in his wet clothes. When the film moves to the present, in the pandemic-era Turkish countryside, Bakir is long dead and Kadir is a lonely middle-aged filmmaker, as insensitive, opportunistic, selfish, haughty, self-important, and dismissive as he was in younger days. He's making a film about this lingering incident and the tragic death of his father, but he takes the liberty of self-justification and casts his father, who was ham-handedly trying to mete out justice, as the story's villain, thereby absolving himself of his own villainy. Forced by interactions with the other family members damaged by those events -- his sister Saliha (Ayca Bingol) and her insightful daughter Naz (Sevval Balkan), his younger brother Yusuf (Fatih Artman), their aging mother Havva (Nur Surer), and even the ever-sweet grownup Cemil (Olgun Simsek) -- Kadir (Okan Yalabik) can no longer tell himself lies about his victimhood. He falls into drunkenness, depression, and an inability to finish his film. Bitterness and self-pity engulf Kadir while the others discuss selling the family house and confront other startling revelations. Many truths are painfully revealed and, as is often the case in life, much is learned but nothing is resolved.