1987: When The Day Comes - A Depressing Tale of A Historical Incident
In a gloomy room surrounded by grey walls, a doctor performs CPR on a young man. After trying hard for a while, he finally says, "He can't be revived." Outside, it’s snowing. Somewhere else, a political person is seen to pay his respects at a memorial. After one of his henchmen whispers something to him, he leaves immediately.
I decided to watch the movie '1987 : When the Day Comes' a while after the July Uprising in our country. Maybe it's because I grew up spending more time with fiction than reality, I find it easily to digest something when it's fictionalized. Which is why I decided to consume a bunch of media content regrading uprisings that occurred in different countries. Watching this movie is part of my project. (I also read Forbidden City and Human Acts as a part of this project).'1987 : When the Day Comes' is so far the gloomiest movie I have ever watched. It’s depressing and it made me feel suffocated. At a certain point, when the guardians were crying over the young man's corpse, I vaguely remember letting out a stifled cry. It didn’t censor the brutality performed on those who participated in the uprising. It also didn’t shy away from the raw portrayal of grievances. Behind every uprising and movements, there are stories of people whose lives were forever altered. On the other side of heroism and sacrifices, there are stories of immense pain. Pain that cannot be nullified or compensated. The first half of 1987 successfully sheds light on those pains. It also shows the two-faced side of politicians, as well as those people who dares to defy them.
When I think of this movie, I see gray. I see white. The day the young man died, it snowed. The grey ashes from his remains were scattered near the white snow. I feel cold and numb. (Reading 'Human Acts' made me feel the same way. Cold. Numb. Grey. Bitter. Depressed.) The movie did a brilliant job with its cinematography, I must say.
On the other side of the young man's death, a group of people were working on protesting in their own way. In that age when there was no internet and telephones were used to communicate, those people used primitive methods of secret communications - hiding secret papers inside magazines and passing them around, holding secret meetings. They risked their lives just to pass a piece of information.
'1987' doesn’t tell us how it ends. It stared with one death and ended with another death. One death is surrounded with grey, white, black. Suffocation, grief and silence. Another death is surrounded with red. Warm, red blood. Rage. United spirit. Heroism. Unrequited love.