Times and Winds Reha Erdem (Turkey)

All film directors as one say that the most difficult is to work with child actors. Turkish director Reha Erdem risked and made his probably best movie Times and Winds.

As usually with films with youngsters in the leading roles, the film is focused on the problem of relationships between fathers and sons. Main heroes of the film Omer, Yakup and Yildiz are children living in a remote Turkish province village. They don’t have much to do – go to school, help parents and spend time together sharing their hopes and fears. The things that are going on in the film are quite obvious and expected. We have seen a boy falling in love with his teacher for a hundred of times already! But Reha Erdem managed to do it in a way that the audience is interested in watching it for the one hundred first time. How?

Easily. The film just includes all the required parts that we are looking for when the plot seems to be familiar. Parts like perfect cast, picturesque locations, beautiful cinematography, attention to the details, and life-verisimilitude full of artistic allegories.

Times and winds is a well-structured film. It is divided into 5 chapters each of which presents a different time of a 24-hours circles, and every of this chapters starts with a muezzin’s calling for pray. And we follow our heroes observing them growing up and changing their dreams and fears night by night, evening by evening, afternoon by afternoon etc. And yes, the clockwise in the movie doesn’t go wrong way, but we see how the heroes spend their mornings in the end as in the morning all the most important mind transformations happen when young people go the way from dark to light, from blind hate to love, from anger to kindness.

The film full of a bit over-pathetic music is a sort of genre when tragic and comic goes together leading the children from being self-centric and full of cute naivety to maturity and a new way of accepting the reality through the very ordinary daily happenings.

By Hanna Mironenko