Product Description

Winner of the Best Film and FIPRESCI prizes at the Istanbul International Film Festival, Reha Erdem s Times and Winds is a film bewitched by the rhythms of everyday life (The Village Voice) that packs a poetic-spiritual punch way beyond its placid surface (Variety). Laying bare forbidden yearnings, dawning sexuality, and oedipal rage, it tells the story of three pre-adolescent friends coming of age in a remote Turkish mountain village. Young teen Omer (Özkan Özen) contemplates the unthinkable as he bitterly struggles under the loveless emotional yoke of his scornful Muslim cleric father. Yakup (Ali Bey Kayali), Omer s best friend, obsesses over a beautiful schoolteacher. Yildiz (Elit Iscan) recoils from burgeoning womanhood, and from the sordid carnal realities she has grown too old to ignore. Blessed with painterly wide-screen visuals, Estonian composer Arvo Part s sublime music score, and phenomenally surefooted performances from an astonishingly adept young cast, Times and Winds contrasts a parochial society s unending chain of cruelty with the pagan natural world s eternal and sensual beauty. Wise in its depiction of the cycle of life, and unblinking in its exploration of fate s capricious malice and childhood s discontent, Times and Winds vision of people in thrall to religious ritual and living at the mercy of nature may be poetic, but it is no idyll (The New York Times).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34453 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-07-15
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: Turkish, English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 111 minutes

Review
Belongs to the same school of primal humanism as SATYAJIT RAY AND KIAROSTAMI --Stephen Holden, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Review
A GORGEOUS DREAMSCAPE OF A FILM... perfectly shot, lyrical vignettes --New York Magazine

Customer Reviews

turkish delight
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.

Pastoral: Reha Erdem's Soliloquy on the Passage of Time and Youth
BAS VAKIT (TIME AND WINDS) is less a narrative film than a suspended contemplation on the cycle of life, the passage of time, and the persistence of family traits. It is a work from Turkey of rare beauty visually, musically, and natural grandeur. Writer/director Reha Erdem is a poet as well as an accomplished filmmaker.

Three young children are approaching the torrents of adolescence, each carrying emotional scars and family histories that will forever alter the way they reach adulthood. Omer (Ozkan Ozen) is the son of the local imam who climbs the minaret five times a day to chant the call to prayer: Omer's younger, smarter brother is favored by the father and Omer copes with the loathing for his father by planning his death. Yakup (Ali Bey Kayali), Omer's closest friend, has a crush on his teacher (Selma Ergeç) but is deeply disillusioned when he spies on his own father (whom he has always defended against his grandfather's abuse) attempting to court his teacher. Yildiz (Elit Iscan) is a girl under-appreciated by her mother and is stunned to overhear her parents coupling. The three children attempt to engage in a normal childhood, reacting tot he beauty of the natural surroundings of their poor little village to the point of learning animal husbandry first hand! They befriend another young orphan Davut (Tarik Sonmez), the town shepherd, when he sustains physical abuse from his guardian. The sensitivity of the children's reflections of their parents' maladaptive behavior creates a bond that sustains their daily trials.

There is not a lot of narrative here, but the sensory pleasures of the film are immense. Divided into sections labeled Night, Evening, Afternoon, Noon and Morning, the film follows the marriage of the calls to worship that clock the lives of these people with the atmospheric cinematography by Florent Herry and embellished by the sumptuous musical score by Arvo Pärt. It is a long film (just short of two hours) that takes its time to unfold the mysteries of coming of age and it is a film that will haunt the viewer long after the credits have ceased. In Turkish with English subtitles. Grady Harp, August 08

a gem!
This is a stunningly beautiful film of everyday life in a small Turkish town. A look at young people growing up that shows that coming-of-age is the same the world over, even in Turkey. Excellent performances from the young cast. Touching, funny, absorbing, memorable. And a beautiful score by Arvo Pärt adds to the overall lushness of the film. I saw this at a film festival in Los Angeles and am happy now to own a copy of it. See this movie!