There are wounds that never heal, but are passed down like a bloodline, a genetic inheritance of pain. They creep into the folds of silence between a father and son, becoming the unspoken language of entire generations. Çağan Irmak's My Father and My Son (Babam ve Oğlum) is the sublime chronicle of one such wound, a work that transcends melodrama to become a national elegy and, at the same time, a universal archetype of an impossible yet necessary reconciliation. Don't be fooled by its reputation as a “tearjerker” of contemporary Turkish cinema; the catharsis the film offers is not cheap. It is a catharsis earned with the precision of a surgeon of the soul, cutting deep into family ties to extract the incandescent core of love, pride, and regret.

The film opens with a narrative topos as old as the world: the return of the prodigal son. But Sadik (Fikret Kuşkan), our protagonist, does not return to his father's house in the Aegean to ask for forgiveness or to claim his share of the inheritance. He returns defeated. A left-wing journalist, idealist, and dreamer, he sacrificed his bond with his father Hüseyin (a monumental Çetin Tekindor) on the altar of revolution. He left the land for the city, traditions for ideology. The 1980 coup, however, not only shattered the dreams of a generation, but literally shattered him. Tortured in prison, with his health irreparably compromised and his wife lost during childbirth in tragic circumstances, Sadik returns to his native village with the only thing he has left: his seven-year-old son, Deniz (Ege Tanman). It is a return that subverts the biblical parable: there is no fat calf waiting for him, but the stony silence of a father who has never forgiven him for choosing politics over family, for putting an abstract idea before his concrete duty as a son.

Here, the film unfolds its first, powerful dialectic. On the one hand, there is Sadik's urban, politicized, intellectual, and defeated Turkey; on the other, there is rural, ancestral Turkey, tied to the cycles of the earth and an unwritten code of honor, embodied by his father Hüseyin. Hüseyin is not simply a reactionary patriarch. He is a peasant king, an Anatolian Lear whose kingdom is his fields and whose tragedy is his inability to understand a son who speaks a different language. His silence is not an absence of feelings, but a wall built with bricks of pain and wounded pride. Çetin Tekindor plays him with a physicality reminiscent of the great patriarchs of Elia Kazan's cinema or the gnarled farmers of Steinbeck's novels: every wrinkle on his face is a map of his disappointment, every slow and deliberate gesture an irrevocable judgment. He is a man who communicates through ellipses, through glances, through a brusque, denied caress, transforming the family drama into a tragedy of classical proportions.

In the midst of these two worlds, these two men incapable of communicating, little Deniz moves. And here Irmak performs his meta-textual stroke of genius. Deniz is not just the innocent witness, the catalyst for reconciliation. He is a nerd, an avid reader of çizgi roman, comic books. His world is populated by heroes with superpowers, by clear narratives where good and evil are clearly distinguished. His colorful and fantastic pop universe becomes his key to decoding the incomprehensible world of adults, a world of hostile silences, inexplicable illnesses, and a grandfather who looks like a fairy-tale ogre. His search for the mythical “Bath Monster” or his attempt to explain the exploits of his paper heroes to a rural world that does not understand them is a poignant metaphor for the condition of a child facing trauma. Like Ofelia in del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth or little Ana in Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, Deniz uses fiction to make sense of a reality too painful to accept. His innocence is not passive; it is an act of hermeneutic resistance, a constant attempt to translate pain into adventure, tragedy into a comic book story with a heroic ending.

Çağan Irmak directs with impeccable classicism, imbued with a warm, almost painterly light. The Aegean countryside is not merely a backdrop, but a living organism, a lost paradise whose pastoral beauty clashes with the drama unfolding within it. There is an echo of Terrence Malick's cinema in the sun-kissed photography, but without its philosophical abstraction; Irmak remains firmly anchored to the faces, bodies, and emotions of his characters. His is a Sirkian melodrama at heart, using the codes of the genre not to manipulate the viewer, but to explore deeper emotional truths. Each shot is calibrated to maximize emotional impact, but it is the writing, rich in detail and unforgettable secondary characters (the protective maternal grandmother, the eccentric friends in the village), that gives the film its extraordinary verisimilitude and prevents it from slipping into sentimentality.

The historical and political context is the immobile engine of the narrative, the original trauma that set everything in motion. But the film, with supreme intelligence and sensitivity, avoids being a political pamphlet. The 1980 coup is not represented with archive footage or scenes of explicit violence; it is present like a ghost, an absence that defines everything. It is in the scars on Sadik's back, in his persistent cough, in his gaze perpetually veiled with melancholy. Irmak shifts the focus from the macro-historical event to its intimate micro-consequences. We are not interested in knowing who was right politically; we are interested in understanding how that historical fracture was replicated, with even more devastating results, within a single family. In My Father and My Son, politics is not an ideology to be debated, but a force of destiny which, like an ancient Greek god, has marked the fate of men, leaving them to pick up the pieces of their lives.

And then there is the ending. An emotional crescendo of rare power, a sequence of reconciliation that has rightfully entered the collective imagination of Turkey and beyond. It is the moment when the emotional dams, built up over years of silence and resentment, finally collapse. The final conversation between father and son, whispered, broken, is a masterpiece of writing and acting. The words left unsaid for a lifetime are finally spoken, not to erase the past, but to accept it, to give it meaning. Filial and paternal love, so long repressed, explodes in a scene of almost unbearable tenderness. It is the perfect catharsis, because it is not an easy absolution, but a painful handover. Hüseyin finally “sees” his son, no longer as a traitor or a failure, but simply as his son. And Sadik, in turn, entrusts the future—his son Deniz—to the past from which he had fled. The final image, with the grandfather carrying his grandson on his shoulders, closes the circle: the wound has not healed, but it has been understood, and the memory of pain can finally be transformed into a legacy of love.

My Father and My Son is a work of heartbreaking greatness. It is a film that manages to be intimately Turkish in its setting and historical context, yet universally human in its core theme. It is a story about the difficulty of being a child and the tragedy of being a father, about memory as a burden and as the only path to salvation. It is proof that great cinema, even when it takes the form of melodrama, can touch the deepest chords of human experience, forcing us to confront our own silences, our own regrets, and our desperate, unquenchable need to be loved and forgiven by those who brought us into the world. A masterpiece.