Is there any border between life and death? What about happiness and sadness? Between war and celebration, these are doppelgängers. The uncertainty of life in Diarbakr such that whatever exist today, may not be here tomorrow. The movie “Meteors” is about war, death and life, about the past and present.
More than anything, the movie is about life’s instability and the permanence of memories.
The only thing left is memories and it reminds us the past was far more stable than the present.
A girl remembers a hunter, she remembers how those swept up in the fires of war, previously celebrated new years together with fireworks. She remembers how the fire works of merriment and war are only separated by a hair’s width and the first becomes the second in the blink of eye. Like the glow of a meteor that is visible for a brief second and gone the next. In one of the best sequences of the movie, after witnessing a meteor shower the village folk are searching for the fragments of the meteors that had rained from the sky. People who lost everything in the war now search for black stones that remind them of the light, as if they hope to find the lost light from their lives, as if they are hoping for an other worldly remedy to their earthly problems. The narrator of “Meteors” similar to the narrator of “Hiroshima, My Love” weaves past, present, memory, love and war and elevates the experience of a people to a shared memory of humanity. The two narrators are both nameless. Both films finish with intertwined images. With images of goat horns intertwined in battle and two snakes in wrapped around each other in euphoria. Perhaps no better ending could be imagined for this film.
