The vicious delights of Turkish film Taiwan fest sings ode to independence

> BY ADRIAN MACK > BY ADRIAN MACK

Even while steeped in age-old and ongoing political and ethnic tensions, Turkey still manages—miraculously— to produce some of the finest cinema in the world. Here are three of the Straight’s favourites from the Vancouver Turkish Film Festival, running at SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts from Friday to Sunday (June 9 to 11).

SWAYING WATERLILY The subdermal anxieties of Istanbul’s middle class are probed and prodded in this wickedly entertaining drama from writer-director Seren Yüce. Despite an admirable life of comfort, fortyish Handan is nagged by a sense of personal underachievement, which she chooses to fix with a new Macbook and the flash decision to become a novelist, like family friend Sinem. Husband Korhan, meanwhile, has his own way of battling midlife ennui— although those dick pics he furtively captures at the office aren’t meant for his wife. Some clunky moments aside, Swaying Waterlily takes vicious delight in putting poor Handan through the wringer. Vanity and an essential lack of substance are her undoing, but she’s cursed with just enough smarts to know when others are twisting their knives. Songül Öden is radiant as the would-be writer (who is smugly reminded by Sinem, on reading a first draft, that waterlilies don’t “sway”), which makes the film even more deliciously painful. June 9 (8:15 p.m.)

DUST CLOTH Too many reviews of this critics’ fave want to apologize for the demands it puts on the viewer, but I could have taken another 30 minutes of Dust Cloth, which follows the travails of two Kurdish cleaning women in a city, Istanbul, that will never really welcome them. Hatun is the more sardonic of the two and definitely better equipped to claw her way into a nicer neighbourhood while steeling herself against the daily indignities levelled by her clients. But it’s Nesrin who draws us in with an aura of incipient tragedy that starts with the disappearance of her apparently no-good husband (and father to their child), then gets worse by degrees. As played by the astonishing Asiye Dinçsoy, she’s a frumpy Modigliani model in sweatpants and a permanent expression of fear mingled with unconquerable despair. You can’t tear your eyes away, all the way to a heartbreaking finale that you knew was coming, right? June 11 (2:45 p.m.) RAUF Kicked out of school for not paying sufficient attention to a rambling war hero, nine-year-old Rauf is sent to work for the local carpenter. Local, in this case, meaning seemingly endless miles away on a vast and dreary Anatolian plain, and carpentry being largely devoted to the construction of caskets. Here is where love and war become much realer things to our young hero—played with bottomless charm by Alen Huseyin Gursoy— as he falls for the boss’s 20-year-old daughter in the midst of a daily existence punctuated by distant gunfire. She loves the colour pink; Rauf can’t even conceive of what it looks like. (“It looks like pink,” he’s told, repeatedly.) Ultragloomy setup aside, this little wonder of a film builds to an ecstatic climax that’s as much Steven Spielberg as it is Nuri Bilge Ceylan. June 11 (7:10 p.m.)

Now in its 11th year, the Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival returns to the Vancity Theatre from Friday to Sunday (June 9 to 11) with another smartly curated batch of films. Here are three titles that strive to colour outside the lines a little.

ODE TO TIME Some 40 years ago, a restless generation turned to western-inspired folk music as a means of asserting itself after decades of martial law. This document of a 2015 stadium concert in Taipei will hit some heavy nostalgia buttons for anyone who was there. For the rest of us, the appeal lies in a history lesson not short on drama, and the discovery of musicians like Ara Kimbo Hu, seen here as a white-haired old man performing the incomparably moving Puyuma song “The Beautiful Rice Fields”. Hu retired from music in 1984 and devoted himself to the Taiwanese Aboriginal Movement. These are artists clearly untroubled by any notions of commerce, and even their music was secondary to the task of accessing and actualizing a nation’s soul. June 9 (6 p.m.), followed by a Q&A; June 11 (2:30 p.m.), followed by a musical performance by Jaga

FORMOSA BETRAYED Kudos to the VTFF for reviving this 2009 American film, which overcomes its boxy plotting to emerge as an unusually tuned-in political thriller. It’s the early ’80s, and FBI agent Jake Kelly (James Van Der Beek) is sent to Taipei to help investigate the murder of a Taiwanese university prof in the U.S. While a State Department lackey played by Wendy Crewson tries to steer him away from trouble—not to mention the illegal protests he keeps bumping into—kelly gradually finds himself inside a more dangerous game than he imagined. While the extreme tensions that preceded Taiwanese democratization are overtly woven into its plot, Formosa Betrayed takes a bold view of coordinated covert action by reactionary forces on a global scale, largely directed by Uncle You-know-who. For the disillusioned G-man, betrayal in this case isn’t confined only to Formosa. June 10 (12:30 p.m.), followed by a panel discussion with filmmaker Adam Kane

THE TAG-ALONG While it leaves no modern horror cliché unturned—from an overreliance on CGI to off-the-shelf sound effects— The Tag-along does introduce us to an uncommonly creepy Taiwanese urban legend in the shape of a mosien. Rumours of the existence of this pint-sized ghost spread after the appearance of an unsettling home video in the ’90s purporting to show a spectral child following uninvited behind a group of mountain hikers. Director Cheng Weihao uses that footage and spins enough of a yarn from it to justify a late-night viewing, while headliner Hsu Wei-ning survives some highly suspect character motivation (why doesn’t she want to get married and have a kid, anyway?) to steal the picture. June 10 (9 p.m.)

Ode to Time.