Rahma (Rahma) (2026)
Director – Faysal Soysal – 2026 – Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy – 121m
*****
A collision of several sets of lives, among them a childless couple, a people trafficker, and a street refugee child – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 30th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
A celebrant chants Latin over several rows of people each covered in a white sheet (like the traditional Western image of a ghost) while an assistant scatters a scent from a holder. One of the sheets (male) reaches out to hold the hand of another (female), who pushes him away.
The local Imam addresses Ibrahim (Ugur Aslan) and Meryam (Denis Isim) about their inability to have children. Abrahams usually can’t have children, he says, but Marys usually do sooner or later. He talks about evil spirits in her womb, and gives her an amulet containing a fresh umbilical cord to ward them off. We are clearly in religious superstition land. As the ritualistic instructions get ever more specific, Meryem goes outside and throws up. Your immediate thought is, morning sickness.
She’s tried herbal mix from the local market, taken whilst soaking in a bath. . They’ve tried everything the doctor recommended, except removing the woman’s defunct womb or getting a foreign surrogate mother to carry the baby to term. An archaeologist, she believes in medical science. A conservative religious traditionalist, he believes in folklore and superstition. He runs a restaurant left him by his equally conservative parents; his father thinks he’s making a mess of it.
His father gives him a set of beads from a shrine which he believe will sort out the couple’s problem. He also gives his son the photo of Cengiz’s Syrian tenant (Levent Celik), who has a kid. Ibrahim is less than keen on this idea. His old school father says he needs to show his wife who’s boss.
Elsewhere in the small backwater town of Urfa, Nidal (Feyyaz Duman) learns that a couple of his relatives have been killed trying to get to Turkey from Aleppo. Rahma was taken to an ISIS camp while her brother Karim joined a group trying to get to Europe. Nidal and Yasemin (Oslem Tas) are trafficking refugees to Greece – Afghans, Iranians, anyone who will pay him. She is helping them out by, for example, feeding them while they stay in transit. Both are themselves refugees.
Nidal takes a fancy to Nafise (Sogol Khaligh) who has fled from an abusive marriage to an Iranian husband with her young son Majid (Ahlas Bulbul) in tow. Perhaps Nidal would really like to have his own family. Or perhaps the woman and her child are merely people he can make money off. That certainly seems to be the case with the street refugees he finds who he sells on to childless couples for a tidy sum. He confides in Nafise that it’s better than what happens to them on the street: abuse, rape, organ gangs.
Meanwhile, Ibrahim sees a young boy on the street and takes pity on him, with his restaurant manager taking the boy in and training him to wait tables. Meryem, shocked by his young age, asks his name. He is Rahim (Nagam Birec). He later sneaks, unbeknownst to the couple, into the back seat of their car, where he overhears driver Ibrahim agreeing to Meryem’s demand to go to Georgia for a surrogate mother provided she agrees to visit a healer at a shrine. They find Rahim in their car, leading to them taking him in; perhaps he’ll be the solution to their desire for a family. However, the boy comes from a troubled, war-torn past and hides an unexpected secret. And there are further circumstances, yet to come to light, which will soon tear this potential family unit apart.
For the finale, Ibrahim and Meryem, now a childless couple again, journey to Georgia only for their car to be stopped at the border for carrying her embryos frozen in a case of Nitrogen, which the border patrol mistakenly believe to be a terrorist bomb. At this point, the couple have only 16 hours to get the embryos to the hospital where the surrogate is based before they are rendered useless.
The clock is also ticking for Nidal, with the word out that the authorities may be about to crack down on the traffickers. Nidal arranges for his current group of refugees to travel tomorrow morning. Among them is Nafise, to whom he lies that her hitherto missing brother has been found and is waiting for her in Greece.
These are extraordinarily compelling lives, pitting the enlightened against the superstitious, the trusting against the deceitful, the women and children against the men. The piece is not kind to ill-founded, conservative beliefs, yet nor does it place its answers to people’s problems in science. Some characters are caught in traps of their own making, others are tricked into following them, and some manage to get our by their own initiative.
Denis Isim is particularly good as Meryam, evoking our sympathy as she tries to go along with her husband’s often slightly loopy plans, eventually coming down hard on him by insisting she has a fatwa for the Georgian surrogate option which she has wanted all along. Nagam Birec lights up the screen as the child. And Feyyaz Duman’s performance as Nidal walks a difficult tightrope between making us want to believe him because his life has been far from easy and knowing that ultimately, neither we nor anyone else can trust him because of his inherent criminal bent.
All in all, a highly original and deeply engaging piece of work.
Rahma premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 30th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 6th to Sunday, November 2nd 2026.
Trailer:
Critics’ Picks mashup trailer:
Festival teaser trailer: