Ever heard of smart house? A term invented by artist and filmmaker Kutlug Ataman, at least according to Variety, smart house is what you find sitting between Turkey’s commercial-minded domestic cinema and its globally acclaimed art-house films. The first is composed of froth that can’t be exported, while the second—as in 2014’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Winter Sleep—tend to be characterized by long, ponderous tales of existential woe set in the bleak Anatolian mountains.

“Nobody watches these films in Turkey, but now there’s a lot of demand for smart house,” explains Hakan Burcuoglu, director of the first-ever Vancouver Turkish Film Festival. “You know: ‘I don’t want a popcorn film, but I don’t want to stare at an apple for four minutes either.’ ”

Along with his partner, VTFF cofounder and president Eylem Sönmez, Burcuoglu has programmed a three-day slam that manages to cover all the ground between lightweight rom-coms (Whisper If I Forget) and four-minute apples (Singing Women).

In the middle is a definitive smart house flick called Consequences, a slick, impressive feature that takes the viewer deep into what Burcuoglu calls “underground Istanbul”. If there were such a thing as “Turkish Steve Soderbergh”—and Burcuoglu wishes there were—Consequences is the kind of film he might make, replete with competing narratives, tense set pieces, great-looking actors, and lots of moral ambiguity.

That said, nothing is likely to test the viewer’s commitment to moral ambiguity as much as Sivas. Burcuoglu is particularly happy to have nabbed the much-lauded, if challenging, festival hit for its Vancouver debut.

“The director, Kaan Müjdeci, is a very interesting guy. He owns a high-end fashion store in Germany, he sells Moncler jackets for 5,000 euros and then he goes and makes an art-house film in eastern Turkey,” Burcuoglu says. “He’s an eccentric dude, and the film is very provocative. People had issues with it in Turkey because of its neutral stance on dogfighting.”

Right—the dogfighting. Sivas is about a boy and his battle-scarred Kangal. “Pure, 100-percent-Turkish shepherd dog,” in Burcuoglu’s words, “and they’re humongous. They’d rip apart a Great Dane in a minute. Crazy dogs. It’s like two heavyweights going at it.”

As brutal as it looks on-screen, the dogfighting, mercifully, is the one thing in Sivas that isn’t real.

“It’s a nonactor film,” continues Burcuoglu, who compares the movie to Ken Loach’s classic of British social realism, Kes. “And the nine-year-old kid in the movie—unbelievable performance. I don’t know how he got it out of him. That’s the actual school he goes to in the film. They took him to Venice for the opening. It was his first time out of the village, let alone on a plane, and this kid is walking the red carpet in Venice.”

Eminently watchable, if every bit as bleak as the art-house model it subverts, Sivas might be the gateway film to harder-core entries like Mold and Thou Gild’st the Even. The first is the Dostoyevskian tale of a middle-aged man (played by Once Upon a Time in Anatolia coscripter Ercan Kesal) doggedly awaiting news of his son, missing for 18 years. The second includes a three-minute scene in which two characters “just puke on each other”.

“If you ask me, it’s a love story,” says Burcuoglu, raising an eyebrow. “The amount of violence in Thou Gild’st the Even puts Tarantino to shame. The film ends and your mouth is hanging open.” He adds that it’s also based on Shakespeare, but that was probably obvious from the puking.

Anyone hoping for a less stressful experience should look into The Butterfly’s Dream. The true-ish tale of two consumptive poets competing for the same girl, Yilmaz Erdoğan’s sumptuous World War II period piece is considered a benchmark in the country’s hundred-year cinema history.

“It’s the film that says Turkish cinema is here,” offers Burcuoglu. “It’s the most expensive film to ever come out of Turkey, it was the Oscar submission last year, and it’s 100-percent-organic, GMO–free Turkish.”

But is it any good?

“I think so,” answers Burcuoglu, with a smile. The 29-year-old programmer and filmmaker—born in Paris to a family of diplomats—is a persuasive advocate for the new festival. With a crisp 11-feature slate, plus shorts, he can afford to be passionate about each of his choices.

“Our intention was to make an all-inclusive film festival. I wanted the hard-core art-house film watcher or film student to go to these provocative, subversive films, but I also wanted somebody to take their 16-year-old daughter to go see a mainstream Turkish film,” he says. “I think we’ve struck a very good balance.”

The Vancouver Turkish Film Festival takes place at the Vancity Theatre from Friday to Sunday (January 23 to 25).