Contemporary Turkish Cinema

İklimler / Climates

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“Man was made to be happy for simple reasons and unhappy for even simpler ones—just as he is born for simple reasons and dies for even simpler ones.” Winner of the FIPRESCI Award in Competition in Cannes Film Festival, İklimler (Climates) is the story of İsa and Bahar, two lonely souls who pursue happiness, which no longer belongs to them in the continuously shifting climate of their inner selves.

From the Press

Some killers do their work in a frenzy of violence. Others wield the knife quietly: they carve out your heart without spilling a drop of blood. In Climates a man and a woman break up with hot tears and lacerating words; there isn’t a knife in sight and their hands look immaculate. There are early signs of trouble between them, but it isn’t until one night, when their anger escapes like poison gas, polluting the air and making them reckless, that the violence of their feeling emerges. In his voice you hear an old, familiar impatience: he talks to her as if she were a child. And when she laughs at him, you hear the bitterness. Climates is the story of a man and a woman, one of whom murders the other’s love... Like Distant, this film paints a haunting portrait of existential solitude, one in which the images speak louder and often more forcefully than do any of the words. (Manohla Dargis, “The Spaces Between People, Even Lovers, in Images of Deceptive Simplicity,” The New York Times, October 27, 2006).

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