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MovieMail's Review
Aylin Kunter explains the depth and beauty of Times and Winds.
In the evocative world of Times and Winds, life in a northern Turkish village is portrayed as constant change. Camera shots of trees, clouds, children merging with the ground as they sleep, show, without the need for words, the ways in which we grow, develop and live as children and the ways in which our parents, as much as they love us, can only do what they know. They are, after all, only human.
Children search for role models. Some find them in their parents, some don’t. Some idolise their parents, some plot to kill. There is a journey to be had in this film. The camera follows the children, through the mountains, along their line of sight into the distance and finally along the cobbled streets as they rush back to see why they are being called for from across the village. The children are on a journey, and the film shows this with its snaking shots of running legs, cobbled lanes passing underneath and a sense of movement. Nothing is ever the same here.
Reha Erdem captures something we are forgetting; human interaction with the earth and the sky, and our fears of not being the people we once hoped we’d be. This is something we can all understand.
Times and Winds may be set in a rural village governed by the calls of the Imam (its original Turkish title is Bes Vakit – Five Times, referring to the division of the day by the call to prayer), the daily baking of bread and the milking of the goat, but I feel that these issues are close to the hearts of many of us living ‘modern’ lives all over the world. Unlike the children in Times and Winds, we can’t lie on the ground and sleep until we wake up.
When this film begins, there is a feeling of relief as we realise it is a story about human beings, a story that shows how close we are to nature and each other. However much we are removed from the earth, and from our fears and emotions on a daily basis, we are a product of our environment and it is there that we grow. Watching Times and Winds was like seeing a good friend after many years and realising that nothing has changed. It reminded me that everything we need and have is right here, in the soil, in the trees, in the mountains and, eventually, in our hearts. This is a beautiful film.
This portrait of life in a poor Turkish village isolated by high mountains, and facing the immense sea, is beautiful indeed. The villagers live according to the rhythm of the earth, the air and water, the day and night and the seasons. Each day is divided into five parts by the sound of the call to prayer, and this device structures the film also, providing an intimate cyclical portrait of the pleasures and frustrations of life there.
