GRAIN
SYNOPSIS
What is it that the two men are after in Dead Lands in an indefinite near future?
The global corporations have established cities and agricultural zones in areas where the climate is relatively good. These cities are populated by the elites, corporation’s executives, scientists, and those multi-ethnic immigrants who have been admitted after passing genetic compatibility tests.
The immigrant masses struggle with hunger and epidemics. Professor Erol Erin (55), a seed genetics specialist, lives in a city protected from them by sophisticated armed forces and magnetic walls. For unknown reasons, the city’s agricultural plantations have been hit by a genetic crisis - and, as a result, by massive crop failure.
In a meeting at the headquarters of the corporation which employs him, Erol learns of Cemil Akman (40), a fellow scientist. Apparently, Cemil wrote a thesis about the recurrent crisis affecting genetically modified seeds – but the work was banned by the corporation. Erol sets out to find Cemil and learn more about the thesis. He discovers that, after losing his wife and all of his scientific research in a suspicious fire, Cemil left the city and moved to Dead Lands, an almost uninhabitable place poisoned by chemical waste. Together with his assistant Andrei (30), Erol illegally crosses the magnetic walls in search of Cemil.
Erol finds Cemil, who is searching for the remains of “life” in Dead Lands. But Cemil believes Erol will not survive the journey, nor be able to handle the truth he will find.
GRAIN DIRECTOR’S NOTE
Almost four years passed before I began to film Grain. During this four-year long hiatus, I encountered a world that has seemingly changed forty times over. The film itself is based on a story that plays out in an unknown future time, one in which man is trying to find ways to deal with series of on-going wars, environmental disasters wrought by climate changes, killing borders erected to dispel refugees, and the chaos engendered by genetically engineered seeds.
Prior to beginning the filming Grain, and while on a search for a shooting location of the kind of a ruined urban landscape seen in Detroit and its environs, I personally encountered a number of refugees from the Middle East, and then -- while in the process of shooting -- I came across countless numbers of Syrian refugees in many places in Turkey’s Anatolia. During this time I also witnessed the poverty stricken who were trying to survive on Stockholm’s freezing streets and saw the continent’s invisible yet very real borders. The film’s story thus intersected with today’s realities.
Grain tells the story of the journey taken by two people who, while on a quest to find pure and untampered grains of wheat, travel both across lands stripped of their life-giving qualities and into the inter-workings of their own beings. They walk through lands beset by thirst and hunger, raging infectious diseases, and poisoned soils, and, during the stops they take along the way, come across children abandoned to their fates and groups of people maimed and defaced by genetic mutations. Their inner journeys force them to traverse deserts of egoism, pride, and nihilism and make their way through swamps of ambition and greed. As he becomes better acquainted with his travel partner Cemil, Erol – who had always operated on the principle of ‘me first’ – becomes introduced to principles of living based on endurance and patience, and the satisfaction engendered by altruism.
Is it not the first rule of travel that those journeying together must be attentive to the needs of the other? And as they pass over high mountains, do our travelers become more and more attuned to the other? And what about their search for unsullied seeds? Can the scattered seeds of man take hold in a world in which man has not first cleansed himself? Does this journey have a final destination?
