Hakki is the first feature film from Hikmet Kerem Özcan, a young Turkish director from Izmir, Turkey. The film is set in Bergama, an historic town located near the Aegean coast, with “a wealth of ancient ruins [which] attract considerable tourist interest today” [Wikipedia].

Hakki, the protagonist, is a slightly worn-looking man who makes a modest living selling souvenirs and offering guiding services outside one of Bergama’s many ancient sites. He gets around by motor scooter, lives in a slightly shabby house with a very rustic yard. He and his wife Nermin have two children: Doruk, a son studying at university, and a daughter, Sude, who lives at home. They appear to have a happy life: a brother and his wife visit regularly; they eat fresh figs occasionally, picked from a neighbour’s tree; Hakki plays backgammon with his brother, outdoors in the shade; he makes silly TikTok videos from time to time with his daughter. Hakki’s younger brother dreams, in his own modest way, of a slightly better life: he and his wife imagine opening a breakfast restaurant, rather than the pancake stand that they currently operate. “Once you mention the Turkish breakfast spread, they go crazy. Jam, they love. Olives, they love...”

But this happy and unassuming life, these modest ambitions, begin to come under threat when Hakki uncovers an ancient figurine while digging around the base of a tree whose roots threaten the foundation of the family home. He knows that artifacts such as this figurine must be reported to authorities, but he decides instead to keep his discovery secret, hoping to benefit in some way from his find. With the help of a colleague he finds a black-market buyer: a sleazy Matthew McConaughey lookalike who arrives in a chauffeur-driven limousine, and dismissively makes a low-ball offer for the figurine. The offered amount, though, is still enough to purchase a new car with some left over, and Hakki, who has no realistic hope of finding another buyer, accepts.

There follows a brief period of modest prosperity: family trips through the countryside in the new car, eating in restaurants rather than at home. But when Hakki learns that he’d been cheated, that the true value of the figurine is much greater — several million euros, hundreds of times greater — than he’d been paid, something in him snaps.

Bülent Emin Yarar does a marvellous job as Hakki, whose transformation from a loving family man with a modest but happy life, to someone completely consumed with an obsessive dream — to uncover more artifacts where the first had been found — is the centrepiece of the film. The tension builds incrementally as Hakki’s excavation beneath the family home, laboriously made by hand with pick and shovel, goes deeper and deeper into the earth, without success. His blind obsession with imagined wealth slowly chips away at everything he has of true value. The progress down this dark path is gradual but relentless, and if the end of the film is somewhat predictable, it is none the less powerful for that.

You can view the trailer for Hakki here. There are two in-theatre screenings of Hakki during VIFF 2024: at 6:45 pm on Thursday September 26 at International Village, and at 1:45 am on Friday September 27 at International Village. You can read additional details on the film at the VIFF website.

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