Review of On Board

On Board (1998)
8/10
A shockingly original character-driven drama of colourful language, drug use and rape.
29 November 2010
Turkish film director Serdar Akar teamed-up with fellow débutante Önder Çakar for this shocking companion piece to "A Madonna in Laleli" by film school classmate Kudret Sabancı, which picked up multiple awards at film festivals in Antalya and Ankara, including the coveted Golden Orange for Second Best Film.

Captain İdris (Erkan Can) heads up the motley crew of a dredger out of Istanbul who while on a drunken shore leave one night in the city's red light district assault a gang of mobsters and kidnap a foreign prostitute to take back with them to their ship in the simple backdrop for this tense character-driven drama.

Golden Orange and Orhan Arıburnu Award-winning actor Erkan Can ("Bana Old and Wise'ı Çal") puts in a star making turn as the worn-out captain with superb support coming from the sleazy Haldun Boysan, the naive Yıldıray Şahinler, the untrustworthy Naci Taşdöğen and the strong yet vulnerable Ella Manea.

The Golden Orange and Orhan Arıburnu Award-winning freshman director, straight out of film school, breaks away from the standard idioms of Turkish cinema to show the squalid lives of these men in a somewhat stylised but highly original way which marks him out as a filmmaker to watch out for in the future.

"Anyway, where were we?"
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