Week 17

Week 17


Thursday 23/4

California Dreamin' (Nesfarsit) (2007)

Winner of the prestigious Cannes award Un Certain Regard in 2007, Cristian Nemescus comedy is based on a true story: a NATO train transporting military equipment is stopped in the middle of nowhere by an overzealous chief of a Romanian train station. Set against the backdrop of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the film explores with humor and gritty realism the impact that the arrival of the American soldiers led by Captain Jones has on the small village community. A cinematic tour de force not to be missed!


Sunday 26/4

Times and Winds (2006)

Here is an utterly involving movie about childhood, by turns mesmeric and shocking; it is as addictive as a soap opera, and mysterious as a dream.

Bes Vakit, or Times and Winds, is the fourth feature from the 48-year-old writer-director Reha Erdem, who has emerged alongside film-makers Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Fatih Akin as a Turkish director for whom film-making is an authentic art form - and his movie recalls the work of Angelopoulos or Kiarostami. This does not, incidentally, prevent it from being completely gripping.

It is set in a mountainous, austerely beautiful region of north-eastern Turkey. Three children in their early teens have much to endure, not merely the harshness of their families' day-to-day lives, gouging a living from the unrewarding soil, but a new, yet harsher reality. As membership of the adult world becomes imminent, an awful truth dawns for them all about their status. They are learning what it means to be second best, what it means to be a woman in a man's world, or to be the son who is not his father's favourite. Nascent sexual longing and the pain of a breakable heart are made a thousand times worse as the facts about their own parents' sexual lives come into focus, leading to confusion and mortification.

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