The "Flowering" of Turkish Cinema

A number of very fine Turkish films have been released in the U.S. in the last few years, including films by Fatih Akin and Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

Writer Kieron Corless in Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute, reviews the latest effort by Asli Ozge--Men on the Bridge--and claims that the film is further evidence that "Turkish cinema continues to flower."

(Men on the Bridge) represent(s) the best of what’s happening in sections of (Turkish) cinema: a willingness to grapple with the big themes and ask the right questions, a socially engaged cinema largely untainted by didacticism, which is generally purveyed in solidly naturalist style and firmly embedded in ordinary lives and real worlds, usually at the sharp end of economic circumstance.