Baba, What's Your Plan?

Baba, What's Your Plan? (Orig. Baba, Ne Yapmayı Düşünüyorsun?) unfolds as an intimate documentary engagment by a son with his father’s life, and at the same time as a quiet portrait of a migrant biography. As Celal Karaaslan narrates and reminisces, with a handheld camera Tolga Karaaslan accompanies his father on his journey through the past: through the landscapes and villages of Turkey where he grew up, and through the significant places of his life in Austria. However, the return to these earlier places does not reveal rediscovery as much as alienation: abandoned houses, a dilapidated school building, a parcel of land that has been sold. Almost everything now appears only as a trace of a past life.

The film thus becomes a quiet narrative about the desire for belonging and continuity, about a life that long revolved around work and whose meaning is shaken by illness. As the father talks about his inability to work and the long wait for his disability pension, questions of identity, responsibility, and familial role models come to the fore. In the dialogue between Celal’s question to his son about what he should do with his life now and the film title’s mirroring question posed by his son, Baba, What's Your Plan? there arises the impetus for a shared search, leading them both on a journey. The attempt at intergenerational understanding is made visible: memories are shared, life stories recorded, and yet it becomes apparent that a part of the past always slips away. Places change, meanings shift, and any record can only approximate the life that has been lived. A brief moment of shared arrival, when several generations sit at the table, suggests the way in which memory remains fleeting before it once again becomes the past. (Hayrunnisa Özçelik)

Translation: John Wojtowicz