Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite review – Turkish kid-in-prison tale is touching and urgent

This gentle but energised piece of work has a rather amazing performance from its five-year-old star at its emotional core

This 1989 movie from Turkish director Tunç Basaran is a gentle and touching but also energised and emotionally urgent piece of work, whose cast present themselves to the audience with a rough-and-ready immediacy, like a theatrical company. But there’s no question as to the star turn: a rather amazing performance from five-year-old newcomer Ozen Bilen as Baris, a wide-eyed little boy who is sent to a women’s prison with his mum Fatma (Füsun Demirel) after Turkey’s 1980 military coup.

Fatma has been convicted for drug-smuggling and now, lethargic and embittered, has not much time for Baris who wanders freely around the shabby hallways and into the bathrooms and dormitory cells. He forms a poignant attachment with Inci (Nür Surer), a political prisoner whose own loneliness finds a heartbreaking expression in her quasi-maternal relationship with this vulnerable child. The movie is recalled in flashback, as Inci (now released) looks over the hills of Ankara and remembers how she promised young Baris that her spirit would fly over the prison like a kite.

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Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite review – Turkish kid-in-prison tale is touching and urgent

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