Steeped in the neo-realist tradition, Yesim Ustaoglu's "Journey to the Sun" presents three characters from the depths of Turkish society in a visually arresting and dramatically compelling fashion.

We first meet Berzan (Nazmi Qirix), a young Kurdish man who has fled from his native village in southeastern Turkey after the army killed his father during a raid. Each dawn he sets up his pushcart in a downtown Istanbul plaza in order to sell videos, cassettes and CD's. In my own NYC, you can see thousands of peddlers just like this who have fled their native countries because of economic hardship or political repression, the late Amadou Diallo included. Apparently Turkey has a similar migration, except it is internal, from the village to the city. Berzan is also a political activist whose main concern is the hunger strikers in Turkish prisons, news of which streams across radio and television during the entire course of the film giving it a newsreel like immediacy.

Next we meet Mehmet (Newroz Baz) who works for the Water Department. Armed with an long brass tube connected to an earphone-like device, he walks through the streets of Istanbul probing the ground. To a trained ear like Mehmet's, faint rumblings might indicate a water leak. That instrument becomes a metaphor for the underground political rumblings that will soon turn his life into a living nightmare.

After watching a soccer game at a pub, Mehmet is en route to the crowded room that he shares with three other working-class men. Out of nowhere a mob of Turkish-flag clad hooligans come running down the street screaming, "Kill the Kurds." After wandering into the mob, Berzan is jumped. Although completely apolitical, Mehmet comes to his rescue out of a sense of fair play. The two men then run off to an nearby apartment building where they hide from further attack. From this chance encounter, a strong friendship immediately develops.

Although Mehmet knows little about what it means to be a persecuted minority, he soon learns how vulnerable an ordinary citizen can become under conditions of fierce repression. Coming home from work the next evening, his bus is stopped at a police roadblock. All the passengers are ordered off to have their id's checked. Unfortunately for Mehmet, another passenger, who fled from the bus moments earlier, has left a gun beneath his seat. The cops suspect Mehmet of being a revolutionary and haul him off to jail where he is interrogated and beaten.

Besides Berzan, the only person in the world who cares about Mehmet is his girl-friend Arzu (Mizgin Kapazan) who works in a laundry. When she goes to the jail to find out about his status, the cops order to sit on a bench until they are ready to speak to her. An elderly woman, clad in traditional Muslim garb, turns to her and says that she has been coming for weeks to find out about her son, but they have yet to tell her anything.

Eventually Mehmet is released. His clothes in tatters and his face bloodied and bruised, he shows up at his furnished room. They explain to him that it is impossible for him to remain there any longer, because he is now a marked man. In the middle of the night, a rightwing death squad has painted a large red "X" on their door, a sign that a "terrorist" lives there. From that moment onward, Mehmet becomes an internal exile dependent on the solidarity of Berzan and the love of Arzu.

Although these are characters caught up in the charged political atmosphere of contemporary Turkey, this is not a film about political intrigue in the fashion of Costa-Gravas. While Mehmet and Arzu are completely apolitical, Berzan's own political beliefs are neither shared with them or the audience. It is simply a given, like their jobs or their appearance. In fact it is Mehmet's appearance that causes him much of his trouble. Since he is swarthy, the cops tend to assume that he is Kurdish even though he insists he is from a small town in northwestern Turkey, far from the Kurdish homeland.

"Journey to the Sun" is the second film by director Yesim Ustaoglu, a 38 year old woman trained as an architect. Whether this previous training explains her acute visual sense or not, one can only wonder at her ability to accent her tale with powerful imagery. Although the film virtually never leaves the abject living and working conditions of the characters, her camera finds a kind of odd beauty in every frame. For example, after Berzan finds Mehmet a job at the local dump, we see him at work surrounded by cattle and seagulls rooting through the garbage for food. Despite the misery of the character and the setting, it has a lyrical quality. (It is in this scene that Mehmet stumbles across a spray can of yellow paint that he eventually uses in a pathetic bid to conceal his dark hair.)

Mehmet and Berzan's friendship is one of the most striking and moving that I have seen in recent film. Perhaps the fact that Ustaoglu is female gives her the liberty to explore the two men's near intimacy in a manner that would have proved more awkward for a male director. When the two men are seated next to each other on a bus, Berzan is touched by the look of sadness on Mehmet's face and invites him to rest his head on his shoulder. This gesture, as much as any other, expresses the emotional core of the film. In the conclusion of the film, Mehmet risks everything to return the gesture.

In an interview with the Village Voice, Ustaoglu spoke about her decision to work with nonprofessional actors. She felt that it was necessary to build an organic relationship between characters and place, mostly on-location shots of Istanbul cafés and streets. She said, "All my films start with an intense desire to look at human beings in a particular environment."

"Journey to the Sun" is now showing at Cinema Village on West 12th St in NYC. Highly recommended.