CicadAnt

İbrahim Er (CicadAnt)
If there isn’t a harmonic structure in my life, I can’t do all these.
Harmony is cohesion, the principle. There’s no harmony in dissonance.

How can a registrar serve tea, a civil servant work at a Turkish bath? People perceive it like this. It is perfectly acceptable, normal for me. What matters is doing your job well. Being a clerk isn’t about neckties. I don’t have a  psychological problem like this. For example, I did an excellent job at the bath, I massaged someone. Two nights later, I wed him. They are all jobs for me.
… One lives for his ideals…

Onur Er (Son)
Who would listen to İbrahim Er if he were to enter the music market today? They don’t know him. Will they listen to him when there’s Timur Selçuk?

Tahsin Talaş (Turkish Bath  Owner, Friend)
The salary’s not enough, we add up from the bath, send him to the lesson.

Timur Selçuk (Musicians, Piano Teacher)
Our İbo is like our lucky charm, our blue bead to avert the evil eye. – Well, he started Before
Christ. Says 20 years. I didn’t realize that.

Tahsin Talaş (Turkish Bath  Owner, Friend)
These are different. I see musical art  as a hobby of developed countries.
Suppose being penniless. I’ll take my guitar, play thinking next payment.
İbrahim Er (CicadAnt)
If you do nonetheless?
Tahsin Talaş (Turkish Bath  Owner, Friend)
God, would it make a good sound when thinking of your debtors. It is  are Inevitably out of tune.

İbrahim Er (CicadAnt)
What’s the world population? 7 billion. 6,5 of these people must be already out of tune.I too am trying  to tune my life in this system.

Purpose
You live in a small town where what you can do is already determined and planned by others. Even mentioning your dreams seems impossible. If you don’t have the option of leaving town by getting into a university or working in a big city to earn money, spending your whole life in that town and following its predictable routine becomes almost inevitable. It was in the middle of such a realization that I met İbo.
İbo works for the İznik Municipality as an announcer, tea server, and wedding officer; after work, he waits tables at a park café. As if all this weren’t enough, he also has a dry piece of land where, without caring what others think, he experiments—planting and uprooting all kinds of trees and plants through trial and error. He even brings soil from faraway Sakarya for his field. He is 45 years old, yet it feels like he lives 48 hours in a single day. At first glance, you can’t comprehend what kind of motivation drives a person to work so relentlessly. Even people chasing careers and money in big cities don’t display this level of energy and passion. He rushes between tasks with endless vitality and a constant state of happiness and hope. He doesn’t tire, but watching him makes you tired. You find yourself asking, along with everyone else, “Is this man crazy?”
Then you discover that İbo does all this for a dream he pursues—fearless of judgment, willing even to face loneliness. In a world where people mistake making plans for the future for actually dreaming, you begin to understand the true importance of having dreams and chasing them. You confront the truth of how dreamless you have become—how dreamless you’ve been made. You start asking İbo questions, though deep down you’re asking yourself:
“Can I still dream? What I call a dream—is it really a dream or just future planning? What am I willing to risk to make my dreams come true? Would I still chase them even if they seemed impossible? Could I bear being alone? Would I let someone close to me live like İbo?”
“Is İbo’s struggle in vain?” “Should art be made only by artists?” “Can the strings of a saz sound right if life itself is out of tune?” “Is there an age for dreaming?” and so on.

While filming and editing The August Ant, I never found clear answers to these questions—perhaps that’s why making this film became, for me, an attempt to share those questions. It was a way of trying to make sense of life together with İbo, who sometimes becomes an ant and sometimes a cicada for the sake of his dreams.

Approach
While making this documentary, we tried to act with full awareness of our responsibility both to the person whose story we were telling and to the ethics of documentary cinema. We made an effort not to objectify İbo, not to offend him, and not to interfere with his reality, but to convey his story truthfully. With the film, we didn’t want viewers to simply say, “What an interesting man,” about İbrahim; rather, we aimed to portray him along with his dreams, hopes, frustrations, surroundings, and inner conflicts.
Throughout the process, we were careful to maintain sincerity and simplicity in our storytelling. The film bears witness to a life—it captures the town’s routines, the social environment, and the tensions within it—all told through the rhythm of İbo’s own life.

Written and Directed by: : Bingöl ELMAS
Executive Producer: Bingöl ELMAS
Editing: Ender YEŞİLDAĞ
Camera: Serdar SÖNMEZ, Koray KESIK, Hayriye SAVAŞÇIOĞLU, Serdar GÜVEN
Assistant Director: Mehtap DOĞAN
Consultant:  Uğur Kutay
Generic Animation: Mustafa Ünlü
Poster Desing:  M. Özgür Candan
Translation: Hakan Paşalı

İbrahim Er
Onur, Sevim Er
Veysel Demirtaş
Tahsin Talaş
Şükrü Talaş
Fatma Er
Veysel Demirtaş

Thanks to
Zeycan Elmas, Çiğdem Kesik, Ömer Tuncer, Savaş Güvezne, Nalan Sakızlı, Pervin Metin, Enis Rıza, Tunç İper
Aslı Ertürk,Barış Özkaya,Sinan Rıza,Ümit Kıvanç,Mustafa Ünlü,Şehbal Şenyurt,Orhan Tanakıncı,Zeynep Cin
Yasin Ali Türkeri,Sezgin Türk,Ümit Altaş,Özgür Candan,Ümit Topaloğlu,Veli Ergül,Mehmet Kombatı,Abbas Doğan
Bedriye Doğan,Zehra Metin,Mehmet Doğru,Bahriye Kabadayı,Burak Dal,Ebru Şeremetli,Selda Salman
Nevzat Kara,Veysel Demirtaş,Tahsin Talaş,Şükrü Talaş,Engin Sürük,Fatma Er,Farut Barut, Özgür Arık

Iznik Municipality Employees
Yapım 13
Seyir Kollektif

And my family

Special thanks to
Sibel Arıkan and her friends