Times and Winds

2007

Turkish

Directed by: Reha Erdem

(111 mins)  Winner of the Best Film and FIPRESCI prizes at the Istanbul International Film Festival, Reha Erdem's Times and Winds is a film "bewitched by the rhythms of everday life" (The Village Voice) that "packs a poetic-spiritual punch way beyond its placid surface" (Variety). Laying bare forbidden yearnings, dawning sexuality, and oedipal rage, the film tells the story of three pre-adolescent friends coming of age in a remote Turkish mountain village. Young teen Omer contemplates the unthinkable as he bitterly struggles under the loveless emotional yoke of his scornful Muslim cleric father. Yakup, Omer's best friend, obsesses over a beautiful schoolteacher. Yildiz recoils from burgeoning womanhood, and from the sordid carnal realities she has grown too old to ignore. Times and Winds contrasts a parochial society's unending chain of cruelty with the pagan natural world's eternal and sensual beauty. Wise in its depiction of the cycle of life, and unblinking in its exploration of fate's capricious malice and childhood's discontent, Times and Winds' "vision of people in thrall to religious ritual and living at the mercy of nature may be poetic, but it is no idyll" (The New York Times).

In Turkish with English subtitles.