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 exis-tence 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.)