Saturday January 24 8pm

Times and Winds (Bes Vakit)
15 cert, 110 mins,      Turkey 2008
Directed by Reha Erdem, starring Ali Bey Kayali, Elit Iscan, Özkan Özen

A portrait of three young people on the cusp of adulthood, Times and Winds is a mesmerising film about the rhythms of life, the experience of faith, and the painful tensions between the reality of rural poverty and the potency of youthful desires and aspirations. 

Yildiz is a bright, studious girl who is struggling with the realisation of what it mean to become a woman. Yakup is a sensitive boy, who nurses a hopeless crush on the beautiful schoolteacher, and Ömer is the son of the local imam, electrified by a new sense of vocation: somehow he must kill his father.

Set in a mountainous, austerely beautiful region of north-eastern Turkey, the film is also a portrait of the sometimes brutal realities of life for the locals eking out a living from arid land, and the grace with which they carry on. But it's Erdem's unsentimental compassion towards his characters, his fidelity to the rhythms of their lives and the arcs of their imaginations, that gives this film its power and depth. The Guardian described it as “a remarkable piece of work, conceived at the highest pitch of intelligence: it is a cinematic poem, replete with fear and rapture, and one of the best films of the year”.

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