Baba, What’s Your Plan?

As Celal Karaaslan recounts and reflects on his past, his son Tolga accompanies him with a handheld camera on a journey through memory: across the landscapes and villages of Turkey where he grew up, and through the places that have shaped his life in Austria. Yet returning to places from the past reveals less a sense of rediscovery than one of estrangement: abandoned houses, a dilapidated school building, a piece of land that has been sold. Almost everything has become a mere trace of a life once lived.

The film unfolds as a quiet meditation on the longing for belonging and continuity, on a life long defined by work and whose meaning is shaken by illness. As the father speaks about being unable to work and the long wait for his disability pension, questions of identity, responsibility and familial roles come to the fore. A shared journey begins to take shape in the dialogue between Celal’s question to his son about what he should do with his life now and the son’s own, reflecting question in the film’s title. Their exchange becomes the starting point for a search they embark on together. The film captures an attempt at intergenerational understanding: memories are shared and life stories preserved, yet it becomes clear that part of the past will always slip away. Places change, meanings shift, and any act of recording can only approximate the reality of a life lived. A brief moment of shared arrival, as several generations gather around the table, hints at how fleeting memory remains before it, too, becomes part of the past. (Hayrunnisa Özçelik)