Before Snowfall is not always an easy watch. It follows a teenager, Siyar, as he travels from Iraqi Kurdistan through Turkey and onwards as he chases his sister. However, this is not to save her. He believes he must kill her after she flees with the man she loves on the day she is to enter into a marriage that he has promised her to.
The film creates moments of unbelievable tension but also a dilemma over how to react to the protagonist. The journey that the audience wills Siyar on is the emotional one to realising his intentions are horribly wrong - a journey away from the oppressive mindset of where he has come from. But you sense he needs to go a long way on his other journey, the one Siyar has chosen for himself towards murder, even as far as finding his sister, to arrive at the destination that the audience needs him to get to - the place where he no longer believes he must kill her. The tension lies in which, if either, he will arrive at first and also the unease about how far you want him to go.
Abdhullah Taher was discovered by chance and is excellent at conveying the tug between what he has always been told the world must be like - and what he must do to be a man - and the new world he is finding both in his travels and his growing friendship with Evin. Evin is the heart of the film, and actress Suzan Ilir steals the show with an exceptional performance. Evin has her own journey to go on and the acctress brings an excellent mix of compassion, fun, ferocity and heartbreak.
This is an ambition first film, tackling a very difficult subject from a new angle which director Hisham Zaman handles brilliantly, walking the tightrope of demonstrating Siyar's conviction without alienating the audience from the character. It is well paced, with gentler moments that develop the characters interspersed and balanced well with the harder and tenser moments.
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