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.

Georgia Straight, June 2017