Institute History
Description
After months without pay, the already disgruntled crew on a Turkish cargo ship arrives in an Egyptian port and learns that the port authority is foreclosing on them. Ordered to anchor offshore, the remaining skeleton crew has their passports seized and must maintain the vessel until its owner's debts are paid. Tensions quickly arise between the authoritarian Cypriot captain, his devoutly religious second-in-command, an affable cook, and a trio of newcomers to the ship—a pair of druggie ne'er-do-wells and the near-mute, hulking Kurd. As months pass, food and entertainment dwindle, alliances shift, and the men take out their raw frustration on one another.
Writer/director Tolga Karaçelik’s second feature, lensed by veteran cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki, Ivy makes effective use of its unique location, allowing distorted shadows and echoing hallways to create a world that’s singularly ominous and vaguely surreal. Karaçelik masterfully depicts how the conflicted crew's confused attempts for mutiny against their oppression spill out into the environment, creating a genre-inflected portrait of caged masculinity—and then things get really weird. —H.Z.