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 'Kuzu' (The Lamb) uses the occasion of the circumcision of a
young boy, Mert, to explore relations in his desperately poor
family, and how his parents behave under the weight of the
social expectation to roast a lamb for a celebration feast.
The vast desolate beauty of Erzincan province's snow-covered
landscapes seems to muffle the emotions characters struggle to
express. The ancient scriptural theme of Abraham and the
near-sacrifice of his son Isaac hangs ominously in the air.
Mert's mother Medine is determined to find and serve a lamb to
win the respect of the village. Meanwhile, Mert's jealous sister
tortures her brother with tales that, if they cannot afford a
lamb, the family will roast and serve up him instead.
The terrified boy spends most of the film in flight, even at one
point cowering in the tandir, the pit oven in the ground where
the lamb is traditionally roasted.
START WITH AN IMAGE
"I always start with an image," said Ataman, who directed the
film and wrote the screenplay.
"The image I had was that I was walking in the empty frozen
fields, and I had a vision of the sky opening and the archangel
Gabriel bringing a ram. It is the story of Abraham and Isaac
from the Old Testament or Ibrahim and Ismail from the Koran."
"I thought wouldn't it be interesting to do a contemporary film
from this image, taking place in contemporary Turkey and dealing
with contemporary Turkish problems."
The problems are many, particularly for Medine, whose bumbling
husband is unable to bear his responsibilities as a father.
Viewers see betrayal and extortion, an alcoholic circumciser and
a hypocritical village elder.
The arrival of singer-prostitute Safiye in town sees modern life
collide with village mores, ultimately leaving Medine to teach
her community a lesson about the traditions it espouses but does
nothing to help individuals uphold.
"Our country is changing at an extremely fast rate ... it is an
amazing terrain of social change. A lot of the villages and
cities in eastern Turkey which were traditionally very poor are
now extremely sophisticated," said Ataman, a keen observer of
how social conventions can stifle the people who follow them.
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 "Obviously that finds its reflection in traditional
values, family values. In many ways modernization is good, but it can
create a lot of stress on the social level, family level and
personal level."
CHANGE
As the film progresses, change comes to the broken village up in the
mountains.
"What the wife wants is to participate in that change ... but the
husband doesn't know how to ... he is like a moth, sees a woman and
the city with fluorescent lights, and he falls for it."
In the end, after a series of twists, the celebration feast takes
place and villagers get their lamb, served up with a surprising
lesson about their prejudices.
Ataman's video and photographic narratives of the personal and
political are in the collections of London's Tate and the Museum of
Modern Art in New York.
Openly gay, Ataman has criticized Prime Minister
Tayyip Erdogan's government's stance on homosexuality, as well as
the treatment of other minorities, even though he has also backed
the ruling AK Party, which traces its roots to political Islam.
Some Turkish artists criticized him for failing to support
anti-government protests that broke out last summer in Istanbul.
When the Turkish army seized power in a 1980 coup, Ataman was
arrested and tortured because of his ties to a left-leaning youth
group and films he made of street demonstrations.
He fled to the United States, where he studied film at UCLA.
(Additional reporting by Ayla Jean
Yackley in Istanbul; editing by Tom Heneghan)
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