Reha Erdem’s quietly beautiful film examines the lives of children in a small Turkish village poised on a mountainside near the sea. Nature is all around them with winds rising and falling, the sun and moon rising and setting, sudden rains, bright sunny days, crisp nights, and the sounds of sheep, goats, donkeys, dogs, and chickens. To the romantic outsider the village might seem idyllic with its timeless lifestyles, homegrown vegetables, fresh baked bread, warm cups of tea, sturdy stone houses with whitewashed walls, rock strewn pathways passing walls of stacked rocks, and an abundance of green trees, plants, and occasional flowers, all with a stunning view of the sea from hilltops. Even a non-Muslim can find beauty and solace in the villagers’ five daily calls to prayer, a welcome interruption which calls the listener back to something grander than daily life, more important than one’s worries, and more comforting in the face of sorrow or loss. The five daily pauses, when the “voice of God’s messenger” floats down from the minaret, mark their lives as surely as do night and day and the passing/returning seasons.
Times and Winds contemplates this village life through the eyes of four children – three with parents and one teenage orphan, who tends the village flocks of sheep and goats. The three youngsters are not yet consigned to the rhythms of working. They have school, light chores and errands, and lots of freedom to wander about, daydreaming, entertaining themselves, passing time mindlessly, and observing the adults. Poised on the edge of adolescence they are getting educated about the world beyond the village through science, poetry, and math while wondering about the adult world, which is often perplexing.
Omer is the older son of the imam, who at times is so sick that he must send for a substitute to go to the minaret to make the call to prayers. The father obviously prefers his younger son, Ali, who can recite poetry and the multiplication tables without fault. The cheerful boy is the joy of his father’s life, while the moody Omer seems to be an inexplicable pain in his side. The mother is just as dismissive of the older boy. The only time either parent touches him is with a blow of the hand. This rivalry between the growing son and the anxious father takes on Oedipal overtones as Omer dreams of ways to kill his father. Yet Omer holds no grudge against little Ali – in fact, he covers his sleeping brother at night when the blankets have been kicked aside. His schemes for eradicating his father range from the almost comic (opening a window at night on the coughing man or emptying out the capsules of his medicine) to the far-fetched (collecting a scorpion to sting his father or buying a knife).
When Omer sits in the room with his family, he listens and watches with sidelong glances. In one scene he is repulsed by their pig-like eating sounds, his ears covered in disgust. When a photographer with a digital camera comes to take a family portrait, Omer sits away from his father but is pulled into the frame. Much of the time he leans with his head against the wall, his face tilted away from his father. His mother is angry with the quiet, moody boy for wandering the mountainside every chance he gets. His is an unhappy life, but there are occasional moments of sharing his feelings with his friend Yakup, who tells him that killing his father would be a sin, especially because he is an imam.
While Omer is filled with hatred of his father, Yakup, who is about his same age, has nothing but love in his heart. His home life is much happier than Omer’s since he is the only child for a little bit longer. He is at ease with both mother and father as they all eat together. However, he is saddened by the way he sees his grandfather treat his father with curses and beating. But the real focus of his love is the young woman teacher, a lovely outsider who brings knowledge to the children and is gentle with them. When Yakup pulls a thorn from her foot, he becomes possessed and won’t wash her blood off his thumb for days. However, his budding fantasy is crushed when he discovers his father has similar interest in the teacher.
The boys’ classmate, Yildiz, is a lovely young girl who does as well as Yakup in class. The teacher even lends the girl a book, which she reads at night by flashlight. Yildiz is very close to her father, who tells her she is the lamb he loves most, but she receives scoldings from her mother, even though she does take care of her baby brother by feeding him and taking him with her to deliver food to their father in the field. But when she suffers the Freudian trauma of catching her parents having sex, her world is likewise turned upside down. An arising awareness of sexual desire among adults, just as among the animals of the village, disturbs both Yakup and Yildiz.
In this village violence can erupt at any time. In the schoolroom a girl has a bruised face (from a mother’s blow) and a boy has a broken arm (from a father’s rough treatment). But it is not only the children who are subject to being hit. Even the fathers of Yildiz and Yakup must put up with their father berating and beating them for not plowing his field or for building a wall wrong. The old “grandma” of the village says, “That’s the way of men. Sweet as little boys, then they become like their fathers when they become fathers themselves. They all turn out to be mad. Damn the whole lot!” Even, or perhaps especially, the orphan boy is beaten for a minor infraction, not by a father or mother, for he has none, but by the ugly Ahmet, who, in turn, is rightly reprimanded by the village elders (naturally all men). But their apparent kindness comes not necessarily from compassion for the boy but from realization that he is the shepherd of their flocks of sheep and goats. They themselves will naturally continue to strike their children when necessary.
Yet it must not be thought that Times and Winds is a Turkish David Lynch film stripping away the dark secrets and hypocrisy of a community. This film is neither horrific nor idyllic. Things are as they have been for generations. The course of a child’s life here is generally determined by parents, community, traditions, the seasons, and the five calls to prayer. Individual hopes or dreams are decreasingly relevant as the child becomes a teenager. In a relatively short while, these children will be much like their parents – marrying, working in the fields, groves, or pastures, building walls, plowing ground, having children, cooking, eating, sleeping, and answering the five calls to prayer throughout each day. But for the presence of the imam’s car, electric lights, a new refrigerator, and a tractor, we would be unsure of their place in time.
The cinematic look of Times and Winds is perfect for the moods and ideas being conveyed. Director of photography Florent Herry, who worked with Erdem on two prior feature films and six subsequent features, is a masterful artist with the camera. Through his lens we see the countryside in long, graceful panning shots, which reveal a land that may not have changed for centuries. Even after the children walk out of the frame, the camera often lingers on the spot so that we might consider what our own lives would be like there. Throughout the film appear striking images: the moon sporadically covered by clouds as its light glistens in the gentle sea, dark trees rustling in the wind, red flowers bursting in bloom, many green bushes and trees in daylight, moonlight on a child’s face, nuts on a tree, a newborn calf and a newborn infant celebrated equally, a partial eclipse of the sun, and a sudden rainstorm. The sounds of nature are always present: wind in trees and bushes, a horse neighing, birds chirping, and sheep and goats bleating. Except for the violence of father to son and mother to daughter, this would be a purely pastoral film. But these are humans, not shepherds and shepherdesses in a romantic poem of past centuries.
Throughout the film we are often running along behind Yildiz, Yakup, or Omer as they move over the pathways, enter their homes, or wander off into the hills. This concentration on their backs puts us right there behind them, somehow becoming a companion of their lives more than if we just saw everything through their eyes.
One slightly unsettling choice the director made was to place throughout the film shots of the individual children lying on the ground, sometimes covered by plants, leaves, or even dirt – as if they are dead, half buried, forgotten, resting, sleeping, dreaming, discarded, or removed from the rest of the village. Just like the imam’s calls to prayer, these shots of the children on the ground mean something more than what they appear to be. They are either leaving this life or will perhaps be reborn into a different one. At the very least they are at one with nature in those quiet moments.
The structure of the film is also noteworthy. Although we see portions of many days, through a period of months, the film is marked by the five calls to prayer, starting with the prayer at night, followed by evening, afternoon, noon, and morning. Even though the days are passing, the prayers depicted are moving backwards, while the lives go forward, thereby creating a subtle tension.
The choice of Estonian composer Arvo Part’s music was brilliant. Selections from Te Deum, Silouans Song, Orient & Occident, and Como cierva sedienta provide a range of moods running from calmness to tension. His beautiful music allows contemplative moods, which are expanded through the views of the countryside and our own suppositions about where these young lives will go. Assuredly they won’t stay as they are now. Their loves and anger will pass. As Omer sits on his cliff overlooking the sea, hearing the substitute muezzin, he prays and cries while the sun rises, removing the darkness and burning away the mist. The morning prayer can always offer the opportunity for hoping for a better day. Perhaps the boy’s heart is no longer hardened against his father.
Born in Istanbul in 1960, Reha Erdem began his studies in History at Bogazici University in his hometown. He studied cinema and plastic arts at the Paris 8 University, which granted him a Master of Arts degree. He directed his first feature-length film Oh Moon in 1989 as a French-Turkish co-production. Eleven years passed before he was able to make a second feature film. Seven years later (2006) he was able to make his fourth feature film, Times and Winds, which garnered at least fourteen international festival awards. Seven feature films have followed during the intervening years, many of which continue to receive well-deserved critical acclaim. Unfortunately, only two of his films are available via streaming platforms. Oh Moon can currently be found on Mubi and Times and Winds can be rented on Amazon Prime Video.
