Times and Winds (12A)

Following in the footsteps of the great communist film-maker Yilmaz Guney, Turkish cinema has always exhibited an epic canvas, portraying personal profile within a political parable.

Recent regulars of the film festival circuit include Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Fatih Akin. Now comes Reha Erdem, who has rightly picked up a couple of honours for Times And Winds.

As the title suggests, it's an expressive film set to the dramatic rhythms of life in a remote mountainous region with stunning sights of the sea on the crossroads between Europe and Asia.

It provides the perfect backdrop to play out the age-old contradiction pictured in every mythology - the struggle of the younger generation to make its mark in a world shaped by its predecessors.

For Erdem, this amounts to rejecting the power of the patriarch as summed up in that well-worn line about honouring thy father, as we're supposed to honour our "original father."

The trouble is that it's a history of real and imagined patricide, as each and every generation plays out its own rites of passage and coming of age.

As an old woman explains, "That's the thing with men. Sweet as little boys, mad as their father and grandfathers and grumpy as old men."

Opening with the sound of the wind whistling through the trees, the scene is set with the sight of a young boy leaning against a window while, inside the house, his father is coughing as a clock ticks loudly.

He's ill and his son trudges through the night to a neighbour to ask him to call for evening prayer as another boy appears to say: "Don't get excited. He'll get better anyway."

Erdem continues as he begins, creating memorable, even mesmerising, scenes depicting the terrible beauties of nature before suddenly shocking us with the brutal depths of humanity.

It ostensibly pictures the lives of two boys and a girl on the cusp of puberty who all exhibit the disappointments that come with growing up, not least wishing to kill their fathers.

But, being a pastoral parable, it is also a meandering metaphor, with the action appearing almost aimless as the children learn that life is determined by custom and practice.

As each day is divided into five parts by the sound of the call to prayer, the film is framed to echo the changing seasons, with the cycles of the moon only being overshadowed by a solar eclipse.

Sadly, by the time that the central child, played by Oskan Ozen, realises that his dad won't get any better, he is left to mourn atop a mountain with the minaret standing empty in the centre of the town.

Ironically, Erdem's conclusion, with the lad crying into the wind before the sun rises to herald another ordinary day, underscores the theme of a country waiting for change.

With Turkey's location at the crossroads between two world cultures, it is a theme explored by Ceylan, Akin and Erdem. Unlike Guney, the new school doesn't envisage a revolutionary change.

Still, the winds of change continue.