My Only Sunshine

Erdem’s formally ambitious follow-up to the promising if bombastic ‘Times and Winds’ is, sadly, a misfire. Centred on a 14-year-old living in a hovel on the banks of the Bosphorus with her smuggler father and ailing, irascible grandfather, it’s an exercise in miserablism, notable more for its audacious narrative repetition and an inventive approach to the relationship between sound and image than for its rather hackneyed social and  psychological observations. The final few minutes, vividly evoking a sense of liberation, display Erdem’s technical expertise but, in terms of drama, feel arbitary and unearned.