Turkey Best Films

Mustang (Turkey) – Sisterhood vs. the Turkish Patriarchy

If you love coming-of-age films like I do then you will love this film. It has all the qualities of a classic family film but with a bit more grit. You’ll learn about the fierce patriarchy in Turkey and the freedom that girls lose when they become women. A nominee at Cannes and the Academy Awards go watch this – it’s on Amazon Prime.

As with most trailers, you’ll get spoilers after the first 30 secs.

Why Watch Mustang?

To experience what it is like growing up as a young girl in a patriarchy
It’s another great coming-of-age film (for more great coming of age films check out Colours of the Mountain, Kikujiro, or Girlhood)
If you have young kids or plan to have kids
Learn how important football is!

The Breakdown

“It’s like everything changed in the blink of an eye. One moment we were fine, then everything turned to shit”

In the blink of an eye, 5 sisters living in rural Turkey transformed from innocent kids into guardians of their families honour.

After school, instead of getting on the bus home, all of the sisters went to the beach with some of their fellow classmates. They all played together in the sea and had shoulder fights then stole some apples from a nearby orchard. A bunch of innocent fun. They are free.

But their freedom is curtailed by a gossiping neighbour who tells the girl’s grandma that they were rubbing their private parts on boys necks in the sea. And with that, their innocence is lost forever.

Conclusion

Mustang reminds me of the great kids films such as The Little Princess which keep you emotionally invested until the end of the film. However, this contains a bit more political weight. Director Deniz Gamze Erguven’s intention was to uncover to women issue in Turkey. A must watch!

Meteors – Martial Law in Kurdish Turkey

Meteors Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

What bad things happened in 2015? You may remember the Paris attacks, the Charleston Church shootings, or even the picture of the drowned Syrian boy lying face down on the beach. However, you probably didn’t hear about the Turkish crackdown on the Kurdish PKK. It seems like no professional cameramen were there to capture the events. However, just as in Silvered Waters, the public captured it all on their mobile phones.

From: Turkey, Asia
Watch: Trailer
Next: Silvered Water, Ahlaam, The Burmese Harp

Chronology – International Competition – SBIFF

A day after Hakan finds out his wife Nihal cannot conceive, she disappears. The last time he saw her was entering an apartment with a man he doesn’t recognize. In his attempts to find her, he brazenly follows the clues to discover things about his wife that he struggles to come to terms with. In order to find her, he has to dispel his idea of a happy marriage.

The film spends a lot of time building up ambiguous clues, which puts more pressure on a grand reveal to deliver the resolution. Unfortunately it builds expectations so high that when the reveal strikes, it isn’t overly surprising or well thought out. The reveal contradicts a lot of what has been done and said from the first half so it has to revisit every part of it to show you how it matches. The reveal does answer some of the questions from the first half but does leave a lot unanswered, as the second half effectively completely rewrites the first act of the film in a quarter of the time. As a result, it feels rushed and almost unbelievable.

That being said, the film deserves credit for portraying domestic violence. It first portrays a violent but innocent man that we can sympathize with and then a man capable of domestic violence. What is clear is that these two perspectives of the same man are indeed the same man. Just as domestic violence perpetrators are ‘normal’ humans by appearance, but violent husbands at home. If only the rest of the script could have held together through the two parts.