After their refugee ship is robbed and sunk in the Sea of Marmara in 1944, seven-year-old Danika is rescued by a British veteran of Gallipoli turned Turkish shepherd. Together, they embark on an epic journey to Istanbul – a city teeming with diplomats, spies, and shady businessmen. Seumas, now known as Tahsin, seeks help from the Head of His Majesty’s Passport Office, a man with whom he once escaped from the POW camp. Their unlikely partnership not only saves Danika but also reshapes Britain’s wartime immigration policy. Decades later, retracing their journey, an elderly Danika reflects: ‘For me... those few weeks I spent with Tahsin... were my childhood.’
Excerpt from the director's notes:
The inspiration for this film came from a haunting piece of TV footage: a little Ukrainian boy, tears streaming down his face, walking toward the border. He clutched a plastic bag containing his teddy bear, and his relatives' address in the Czech Republic was written on his hand. That image stayed with me, and I knew I had to create something to honor the memory of every child-refugee from every war. The stories of two elderly friends also shaped the idea. Both crossed the mine-infested Black Sea as children, seeking refuge in what was then British Mandatory Palestine. Six-year-old Moshik, from Chernivtsi, was aboard a ship that sank after the crew robbed and abandoned its passengers. The handful of survivors washed ashore in Turkey. Moshik and his family only reached their destination in 1947 after being interned in Cyprus by British authorities. He later became a celebrated architect in Israel and worked in collaboration with Turkish construction companies. Dani, from Cluj, completed his journey in 1944, travelling by train from Istanbul to Haifa. His passage by land was made possible by Viscount Cranborne’s letter—a key moment explored in the script.
Iconic images from films close to my heart have greatly influenced this story. With friend, cinematographer Tibor Máthé, we often discussed the works that shaped us, including La Strada, Miracle in Milan, and The Straight Story. These films are, in their essence, “fairy tales,” which is how we have come to define the genre of the planned movie. We drew inspiration from their focus on visuals and actions over dialogue. In Miracle in Milan, for example, a neorealist fairy tale (only an apparent contradiction!), the real estate mogul preparing to seize the land of the poor delivers a populist speech. His words, however, devolve into meaningless noise – no longer a human voice . However, even in more realistic films as well as in real-life situations, language often obscures the truth rather than revealing it. Sometimes actions tell the whole story, relegating speech to be just melody to underscore the incident. A good example is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia which we will also invoke and pay a visual “homage” to by recreating the scene of the Muhtar’s daughter’s apparition-like tea-offering with the angelic appearance of Ma as the character of the Photographer’s Daughter. In Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film the babbling of the police car passengers merely creates the audio background to the night journey of the characters – while their faces and the barren landscape are just as important.
