In the opening moments of “Before Snowfall,” a sixteen–year–old boy is wrapped in plastic and tossed into a fuel can in order to evade border security. After crossing to the other side, he asks for directions to Istanbul, where he believes his sister might be. Why? The answer is presented with a straight face that betrays no grimace, no hesitancy: “I will find her and kill her.”
Through a series of flashbacks, the circumstances that have necessitated the boy’s journey are revealed. Siyar’s sister has run away from their Kurdish village and her arranged marriage, leaving their entire family wracked with shame. Siyar must kill her in order to restore honor to their family. Honor, we learn, is very much a life–or–death matter to Siyar.
Siyar travels from sweeping mountains to streets littered with pickpockets to a suburban neighborhood. He meets a precocious boy with glasses too wide for his face, a smuggler who promises anything as long as he can pay and a girl who steals his wallet, smiles to him on a train and kisses him on a snowy day in Germany. They all have very different ideas of honor.
As the film picks up momentum and Siyar’s journey begins to spiral out of control, his gait strengthens. He laughs. He questions. He demonstrates a goodness that has no place in circumstances as dangerous as his. It is in these quiet, tender moments—when the viewer watches Siyar grow up and grow out of the rigid conceptions of morality he has always held—that the film excels.
There is no antagonist in “Before Snowfall.” There is no one to root against as the miles fly by and Siyar draws ever closer to a murder he knows he must commit but finds himself questioning anyway. Even as the film barrels into its gut–wrenching ending—the final gunshots, the inevitable twist of a knife, the crimson staining the snow—there is no one to blame. There are only people placed in desperate situations, reacting the only way they know how to.
Grade: A
Runtime: 105 mins.
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