Nothing In Its Place: The historic drama centred on Turkey's deadly 1978 Bahçelievler massacre

At 31 years of age, filmmaker Burak Çevik has already built a noteworthy filmography, comprising five feature films.

Three of these celebrated their world premieres in the Berlinale's Forum section: his extravagant debut The Pillar of Salt (2018) — about a pregnant young woman living in a cave, searching for her vanished sister; the psychological thriller Belonging (2019) — which analyses the emotions leading up to a cold-blooded murder; and the intimate Forms of Forgetting (2023) — exploring how history is layered and rewritten through memory.

In all of these films, Çevik, an auteur with a penchant for cinematic experimentation, employs a thoughtfully crafted film language that contributes to creating unusual experiences.

His latest feature, Nothing In Its Place, which recently celebrated its international premiere at the Proxima Competition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, appears more conventionally structured but only at first glance.

Designed around the unity of time and place of action, the film develops internal dynamics through a single sequence shot (which might also be a masterful compilation of several longer ones) and unusual camera angles that escalate the tension in a barely noticeable yet intense manner, characteristic of psychological thrillers.

Nevertheless, one of the strongest tools for building suspense is not the visual aspect of the film but the dialogue.

Zooming into 1978 Turkey

To fully grasp the complex background of the film, one must be familiar with the historical context and the material on which Nothing In Its Place is based.

The year 1978 is a significant one in Turkish history, marked by political violence and a series of tragic events that preceded Kenan Evren’s military coup d’état in 1980.

The first striking event occurred in March when police and civilian right-wingers bombed and shot leftist students in Beyazıt Square, killing seven as they exited a school.

Çevik chooses to focus on another similar and equally bloody but less publicised event, possibly because its closed setting offers a chance to reconstruct a political debate that remains relevant even today.

The so-called Bahçelievler massacre occurred on October 9 and is named after the neighbourhood in Ankara where it took place.

In a quiet flat, like-minded friends were discussing their shared views and the possibility of conducting a bloodless revolution. During a single night, these members of the Workers' Party of Turkey were killed by ultra-nationalists, including Grey Wolves' leader Abdullah Çatlı and Haluk Kırcı.

The attackers, armed with weapons, were reportedly astonished to find the "revolutionary" students unarmed in their student dormitory apartment — a premise used to develop the philosophical opposition in the film, grounded in the dichotomy between passive intellectuals and aggressive radicals, between men of words and men of deeds.

Confident that "the educated traitor is more dangerous," as emphasised in the film, the perpetrators torture and kill five of the students inside, while two others are taken away by car and murdered nearby.

However, this parallel event is omitted from the film’s narrative. Nothing In Its Place unfolds exclusively indoors, accentuating two important aspects: the left-wingers' idealism detached from outside reality and the isolation of their ideas within the walls, and their immediate vulnerability upon encountering the physical world outside.

When debate turns to violence

The film is divided into two parts: before and after the attack. In the first part, the young leftists read and discuss around the living room table in dim light, covering topics from Marx to the Pinochet-Allende clash to Johan Cruyff’s controversial participation in the Ajax team, which supported the Nazis.

They modestly celebrate the birthday of one of their group while denouncing birthday parties as bourgeois. They also discuss the magazine they edit together and an article published by one of them, which analytically challenges right-wing ideas.

Should they read fascist literature to competently argue with their political opponents, or is there a danger of poisoning their idealistic innocence? The reading in question is Nine Lights, first published in 1965 as a political pamphlet, but by 1978, it had evolved into an ideological manifesto presented in a book by Alparslan Türkeş, the founder of the Nationalist Movement Party of Turkey.

Then, exactly halfway through the film, the birthday man goes out for more wine and cigarettes.

Parallel to him, the camera leaves the apartment to spot the two perpetrators walking towards the building.

“Don’t think too much, it’s stressful when you think,” one says to the other before climbing the stairs and rushing to the students — sweeping away all the ambiguity and intellectual hesitations of the previous scene, along with the hope that a bloodless revolution is possible.

The preceding atmosphere of debate is brutally displaced by screams and threats, while the most serious mental exercise the attackers are capable of is making their victims repeat the “good-for-everybody” tenets of their guiding doctrine, Nine Lights.

The remainder of the film, leading to the predetermined ending, is excruciating to watch — not so much because of the explicit verbal and physical violence, but due to the slow but sure trampling of the hope that civilised debate and a “velvet” revolution in politics is a real prospect when power is on the side of one of the two rival camps.

Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca De Catalunya, Arxiu Xcèntric, goEast Wiesbaden, etc. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films