Led by a man consumed with envy and the need to prove himself, a land dispute ends in massacre. Emin Alper's Silver Bear-winning thriller is a chilling study of how ordinary people find their way to extraordinary violence.
Alper looks at the architecture of an atrocity and the superstitions, religious fervour, weaponised misconceptions and long-cherished lies that underpin an act of extreme violence.
Salvation 2026
Kurtuluş
How do you justify the unjustifiable? How do you get to the point where you feel morally in the right while you slaughter unarmed men, women and children? These are the questions director Emin Alper seeks to explore in Salvation, a film notionally about the longtail fallout from a land dispute, but more elementally about how violence happens.
Set in a Turkish village high in the mountains, the director’s fifth film — and his first since the 2022’s Cannes Un Certain Regard entry Burning Days — follows the trajectory of Mesut (an excellent and tragically believable Caner Cı̇ndoruk), whose personal insecurities set him on a path leading to a massacre.
Sadly, the film isn’t mere fiction. In 2009, 44 people were murdered at a party in the Mardin Province of Turkey by masked assailants using automatic weapons and hand grenades. But the relevance of Salvation is even broader: The rhetoric of politicians like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin plays on the same primal fears that allow Mesut to secure support for his bloodthirsty strongman tactics.
– Catherine Bray, Variety