I don’t know much about Turkey.  So it is nice to have a little insight.  Mercifully, Netflix seems to have a bit of a soft spot for this part of the world.  This is a sweet movie with lots of romance.  Yet, you still get a sense of the crush of modernity on traditional society.

The story follows a family in the eastern highlands in the region of Hakkiri,  who subsequently move down to the southwestern city on Antalya on the Mediterranean.  It is sufficiently ethnographic to be an interesting complement to 20th Century Women.  The depiction is of a traditional, residually nomadic culture. Perhaps the time frame is more a movie conceit than reality, but what is shown to happen in this part of Turkey in the late 70’s and early 80’s mirrors similar changes in Greece 20-30 years earlier.

Women bear the brunt of traditional patriarchy, but modernity, in this instance, chips away at the ties that bind, even in an area this remote.  The film sweetly illustrates the shift, the accompanying damage and opening horizons. The secular tone does not fit with the media image of contemporary Turkey. Nice to see different faces with some perspective on a different history.

Some interesting FX: