*Turkey*

“The Wild Pear Tree is a gentle, humane, beautifully made and magnificently acted movie from the Turkish filmmaker and former Palme winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan: garrulous, humorous and lugubrious in his unmistakable and very engaging style. It’s an unhurried, elegiac address to the idea of childhood and your home town – and how returning to [...]

“The contrasting lives of two women provide a stark insight into the turmoil of modern Turkey in Clair Obscur (Tereddut). Whether ostensibly liberated or emphatically oppressed, the women both inhabit a society where men dominate and women suffer. Differing perspectives on those big issues gradually bind together into a heartrending, politically charged human drama that [...]

“Paranoia grips the characters and saturates the screen in Emin Alper’s “Frenzy”, a deliberately oppressive parable of a society brought to heel by its fear of terrorism. One of the more topical films of the year, this intense mind-playing psycho-social drama, from the director of “Beyond the Hill,” plunges the viewer into a disturbing state [...]