The Ceremony – Erdal Yildiz and Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu

THE CEREMONY
Directed by Jack King
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆☆

SOMETIMES a film casts a peering light that makes the writer appear to be intrinsically part of the zeitgeist.

This week, amid news of protests outside hotels where people fleeing war and famine are temporarily sleeping, The Ceremony feels all the more important. Writer director Jack King has created something little short of a masterpiece, a ground level look at two people’s lives through the prism of a genuine thriller, and one that gives two lead characters, playing
asylum seekers, the humanity that our civic discourse so often robs them of.

Cristi (Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu) is working at a car wash in Bradford. He cannot afford to live on the sub-poverty-level money asylum seekers are given and so works for cash-in-hand, sharing a house with other workers, all waiting for documentation to allow them to enter society.

When a fellow asylum seeker is found dead at the car wash, Cristi turns to Yusuf (Erdal Yildiz), a Kurdish refugee, to help. If they report the death to the authorities, everyone will be at risk – but what other paths are open to them?

The Ceremony has a lot to unpick. From a cinematic point of view, it is gorgeous – the characters’ faces spark a cascade of stories behind their eyes. Using a chromomatic black and white print, Yorkshire in winter looks both bleak and beautiful, it provides the right canvas for a modern tragedy. Yildiz and Cucu-Dumitrescu turn in believable performances, telling this story with humanity and pathos.

One important element is the voices King gives a platform to: Yorkshire accents come in off-stage, periphery tones that add further authenticity and atmosphere. It also allows the leads to own centre stage, and creates what feels like a genuine snapshot of our nation today.

Bradford has a long and fruitful history of inward migration. JB Priestley wrote about the city’s links with Ireland and India in the 19th century as it became the centre of the wool trade. In the mid-20th century people from South Asia came to Bradford. This film is therefore very much in keeping with a story that stretches back over centuries.

Sadly, today, and in a manner that should be utterly to our collective shame, ridiculous scare stories about migrants make headlines. Anything that reminds us of both our nation’s real history and that a migrant is a human being is timely and worthwhile.