Summer Love

A record of a girl's first summer crush (based on a story by co-writer Gül Dirican), it begins with Esma being carted off to country relatives for the holiday as some sort of remedy for her poor grades in religion at school. The village is rife with prune-faced crones nattering about land politics and trading disapproval of the girl's beautiful aunt Saliha's abandonment of her fiancé; it's also full of possibilities, and Esma swivels between tomboyish scrapes and newfound feminine fancies, in particularl handsome tractor boy Hüseyin. If it's never very clear, at a more detailed level, what's going on or why, it must be said that Pirhasan conjures a sweet sense of place and personality.