This article was automatically translated from the original Turkish version.
Zeki Demirkubuz and Nuri Bilge Ceylan are two of Türkiye’s most significant creative filmmakers, whose cinematic languages lay bare the individual’s inner conflicts, social decay, and the dark facets of human nature.
Released in 2008, Three Monkeys is Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s internationally acclaimed film that won the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film explores themes of silence, complicity, and conscience through a chain of traumatic events affecting a family living in one of Istanbul’s peripheral neighborhoods.
The story begins when Servet, who is preparing to enter politics, convinces his driver Eyüp to take the blame for a traffic accident in exchange for money. Eyüp is imprisoned, leaving behind his wife Hacer and their son İsmail. Struggling to make ends meet, Hacer enters a secret relationship with Servet. Meanwhile, İsmail discovers his mother’s affair. When Eyüp returns from prison, everything has changed—but no one speaks openly. Everyone behaves as if they have seen nothing, heard nothing, and known nothing.
The central relationship among the three characters—Eyüp, Hacer, and İsmail—is built on a tense silence. Eyüp suspects his wife’s betrayal but never voices it. Hacer, overwhelmed by poverty and the helplessness imposed by being a woman, draws closer to Servet. İsmail senses the disintegration of his family but feels powerless to intervene. The film conveys the trio’s shared silence and inner collapse to the viewer through a quiet yet intense narrative.
Like the famous Japanese proverb from which it takes its title, Three Monkeys progresses through the metaphors of not seeing, not hearing, and not speaking. Throughout the film, the characters avoid any direct confrontation despite the profound conflicts they endure. This avoidance gradually transforms into a deep-seated guilt and moral emptiness that consumes them from within.
A scene from the film Three Monkeys. (NTV)
Zeki Demirkubuz’s 2016 film Kor examines themes of betrayal, pride, suspicion, and silence within the framework of a family drama. The film opens with Cemal’s return to Istanbul after serving time in prison in Romania, where he had worked illegally as a migrant laborer. His wife Emine, left behind, sought help from Cemal’s former employer Ziya to care for their sick son. Ziya, who has long harbored feelings for Emine, begins a relationship with her during this period.
When Cemal returns home, he notices changes in his wife’s behavior and suspects something is happening between her and Ziya—but he never confronts them directly. Emine, on one hand, tries to hold on to her new life, while on the other, she feels the weight of her old reality. Ziya, by contrast, lets events unfold passively; he is consistently a more submissive and accepting character. Intense tension exists among the three, yet it never erupts. Instead, the characters express what is happening through silence, glances, and subtle gestures.
Kor embodies the defining characteristics of Demirkubuz’s cinema: unacknowledged emotions, repressed passions, fatalism, and internal reckonings. The characters do not externalize their feelings; they bury them inside, unable to articulate them in words. This silence consumes them with profound loneliness. As in all Demirkubuz films, apartment units become mirrors of the characters’ inner worlds.
A scene from the film Kor. (AA)
Both Kor and Three Monkeys underscore that silence is not merely personal but social. In both films, characters attempt to carry on with their lives by normalizing major traumas. This is not simply individual collapse—it has become a shared social practice of denial. While Ceylan places the unspoken, the unsaid, and the unresolved at the center of his camera, Demirkubuz focuses inward, on the individual’s internal reckoning with conscience and the inability to articulate it.
For the male characters in these films, silence is less a sign of weakness than a defense mechanism wrapped in pride. Neither Eyüp nor Cemal can speak, because speaking would mean humiliating themselves. To learn the truth would mean being crushed beneath it, witnessing the collapse of life’s rules and the shattering of the balances they have built. The shame they would feel in the face of the truth, the fear of breaking apart, and their inability to bear the weight of their pride silence them. Perhaps they cannot bear the emotional burden of their response, or perhaps they sense they lack the strength to act on the anger they feel toward their wives—and so they sink deeper into silence.
The female characters—Hacer and Emine—though outwardly passive, demonstrate a unique form of resistance and presence within this silence. Emine’s decision to seek help from Ziya and Hacer’s continuation of her relationship with Servet are survival strategies embedded in silence.
It is clear that society also contributes to this regime of silence. The male gossip in the café in Kor, and Servet’s casual offer of money to Eyüp in Three Monkeys as if nothing had happened, both produce a kind of collective consent. A truth known to all but spoken by none is sustained through a shared lie. This is not merely the silence of individuals—it is the silence of a society that has forgotten how to speak.
In both films, “living as if nothing had happened” is portrayed not as a conscious choice but as an unavoidable necessity. Confronting the truth means the collapse of everything one has built. People remain silent because they do not know how to respond to the truth they have learned, fearing they will be crushed beneath its weight. The truth is too heavy to face. Silence, by contrast, offers temporary stability—at least the illusion that life continues.
The films examined here powerfully reveal how unspoken traumas, unspeakable guilt, and repressed emotions create a regime of silence on both personal and social levels. Through Ceylan’s striking visual language and Demirkubuz’s distant mise-en-scène, this silence becomes as powerful a narrative force as speech.
Kor and Three Monkeys are two masterpieces of Turkish cinema that mutually inform and dialogue with each other, offering aesthetic and narrative representations of silence, unspeakability, and denial. These films reveal with great sensitivity how the human inability to confront one’s own truth transforms into an existential agony, and how shame and pride silently erode the individual from within. The pain echoing in the characters’ silence is not merely their personal tragedies—it is the silent cry of society, culture, and human nature itself.
Demirkubuz and Ceylan do not merely ask viewers to watch stories—they compel them to confront their own silences. Through these films, viewers recognize their own unspoken moments, the truths they have avoided, and the quiet internal collapses that have grown within them. For this reason, Kor and Three Monkeys do not simply linger in memory as films seen—they are felt and carried. The cry born from silence becomes an unforgettable echo over time.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys
Demirkubuz’s Kor
The Cinematography of Silence: A Social Confrontation Through Two Films
“Let’s Pretend Nothing Happened!”