Times and Winds (2007) — Turkey

Writer and director Reha Erdem situates his film in a mountainous Turkish village to explore the rhythms of nature and multi-generational family strife. He tells the story from the perspective of three adolescent classmates. Omer hates his imam father; he dreams, prays, and plans how he might die. His best friend Yakup is infatuated with the school teacher and enraged when he catches his own father leering at her through a window. Yildiz slaves away like all the women in this movie, cooking, cleaning, and caring for her baby brother. All the themes of adolescent coming of age emerge here — birth and death, sex and shame, guilt and longing, fear and confusion, oedipal love and male violence, nationalism and religion. The imperatives of nature surround everyone, with spectacular scenes of mountains and sea, wind and rain, a cloudy moon and a solar eclipse, animals mating, birthing, and being butchered. Erdem organizes the film around Islam's five calls to prayer, but in reverse order as if to accentuate the disorientation of adolescence: night, evening, afternoon, noon, and morning. In Turkish with English subtitles.