Deniz Buga | Kardeşler (Brothers) / 2004

a taste of blood

by Douglas Messerli

 

Deniz Buga (screenwriter and director) Kardeşler (Brothers) / 2004 [6 minutes]

 

In this charming Turkish short, written and directed by Deniz Buga, two gay boys (Fatih Genҫkal and Onur Karaoğlu), laying side by side in bed, can’t keep their hands off of one another. One boy notices a slight scab on the body of the other, and wonders if it itches.

    He remembers when he broke his arm three years earlier and they put a cast on it. It itched so bad that he couldn’t even sleep; he was desperate to scratch it. Might he scratch his friends scab, he wonders.

    But the friend suggests that he were to scratch it, it would bleed and another scab would replace it, and if he scratched that one, it would again bleed, and a new scab would appear. Yet that doesn’t stop his friend from preceding to scratch it, producing a small amount of blood.

     He produces the scab intact and wonders if the other has ever tasted it, presumably meaning his own blood. Of course, responds the other, everyone has tasted their own blood. The friend tastes the blood of his friend, declaring it tastes much better than his. He ties it again and insists, yes that indeed it tastes better.

     To test the situation, the other gets up and brings back a small knife, cutting his friend’s finger ever so slightly and tasting his blood, along with his own. He likes his friend’s blood, both agreeing that blood always tastes better when it belong to someone else.

     The two decide to mix their blood, becoming blood brothers. And after they do so the other snuggles his face even closer to the other than he previously had, his friend wondering if that was what blood brothers did.

      Nothing else happens, the two just continuing to enjoy the feel of each other’s bodies, no sex involved. Unless you’re obsessed by vampires, this exploration of gay love is truly as innocent and charming as almost queer film I’ve seen, reminding me a little of some of the scenes between the older and younger student in Jean Delannoy’s Les amitiés particulières of 1964, but without all the drama of the patriarchal churchmen attempting to break up the boys who have also defined themselves as “blood brothers.”

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).