The Town That Drove Away (2025) ‘Visions du Réel’ Movie Review: Searing Portraits of Displacement and Erasure

Stories of displacement are as ancient as time itself. They are inscribed in the annals of civilization, inextricably linked to the act of survival. Yet their brutal, forbidding power remains unshakable, insistent. To deny the price humanity and ecosystems have to bear in the name of urbanisation and development is to bring further moral corrosion and expedite our own collapse. Instead of escaping, we must confront the hard truths of our overreaching when we should hold back and assess the damage done. Natalia Pietsch and Grzegorz Piekarski’s documentary “The Town That Drove Away” underscores the horrid, pained reality of such uprooting, calling for a reappraisal.

We must name the crime, record it, and demand due accountability. Centuries of peace and concord can be wholly shattered with incursions of development as it slashes through the village of Hasankeyf in Anatolia. Things can change in a day. With the Ilisu dam being erected, orders come in for immediate evacuation. Relocation to a new town a few miles away is promised, but it isn’t extended to single individuals. What of their lives? They are wholly pushed off any consideration; however, even the rehabilitated ones are riven apart.

What does hope look like when your home itself is torn down before your eyes? How do you keep going, let your heart fortify against the crashing tide of despair and defeat? Bulldozers rolling in are ominous visions, putting a pall of dread over the village. With them arrive tumultuous, devastating change. The land is cut through, residents ejected, and violence hurtling in. So much is dramatically altered, people trapped see-sawing between bruised acceptance of a new fate and the stubborn clutch onto the old, what one had imagined as the only future.

The reallocated houses are all uniform in appearance. It all looks identical. Loudspeakers blare to avoid changes to structures. Residents are ordered to stick to consistent facades. They are promptly reminded every now and then that it’s government property they are occupying. So they have lost their home and now the compensation offered can’t even be claimed as theirs. What do they have now? Ownership itself is forfeited without their having any say in it. Loss hovers in the air. As there’s a forced mass exodus, only a few linger in the old village: a barber, Burak, and a shepherd, Rengin.

The Town That Drove Away (2025) — A still from “The Town That Drove Away” (2025)

It’s a handful that has to constantly grapple with conflicts within endurance and resistance and not buckle or succumb to the popular wave. One is taunted for his unfruitful patriotism, then, there’s Sumeyye with her expansively hopeful gaze, determined to find admission and turn around her life. The film swirls from them to the landscapes, etched with magnificent, grim power in Pietsch and Pierkarski’s camerawork. These new houses are divested of any personality, as if to emphasise a flattening of the fate of the displaced. All must fall in line with the government’s diktats while glibly reassured that their needs will be met and their voices heard. Entire communities are herded out of a place they’ve known, worked in, and loved for as long as their lives, only to be brutally stowed away.

“The Town That Drove Away” shares many echoes with another film playing at the festival, Yashasvi Juyal’s “Rains Don’t Make Us Happy Anymore,” which also surveys a village flooded by a dam. Images recur across the two. Nevertheless, Juyal’s film takes a more formally playful slant and invokes local myth. On the other hand, this film is remonstratively, elegiacally direct.

There’s both searching truth and sweeping focus in “The Town That Drove Away.” Its heightened tragedy registers with immediate stabs. While the film could have benefited from a more entrenched gaze at linked politics, there’s no denying the soft but firm tug of emotion it elicits. This is a lucidly composed, urgent work, full of majestic ache and terse but clear articulation. It’s immense and abiding. Do not look away.