Times and Winds

Islamic faith holds that prayer uttered five times every day brings man face to face with his five "phases," or states of mind resulting from the tension of workaday life: fear and desire, love and grudge, faith and pain, screams and sobbing and passion and hate. Since every encounter in Islamic life is said to create new pain--whether that of growing up, growing old or merely getting by--then prayer is the panacea for the inevitable tragedy that is life. In Turkish director Reha Erdem's sumptuously composed fourth feature, childhood life in a rural village on a mountain overlooking the sea is the incubator for an examination of that pain as experienced through the eyes of three very different children: Ömer, the son of the local imam; his best friend, Yakup, who's enamored with the village schoolteacher; and Yildiz, who is forced to balance her studies with the household needs of her demanding mother. Their youthful internal struggles play out against a natural backdrop of passing hours, changing seasons and rural tradition.