The Mirror

Based on The White Ox by Osman Sahin, this unrelenting Turkish moral tale (punctuated with many charged silences) was shot in Greece as a German-British co-production. Its theme is the mind-bending effects of extreme poverty. A rich young aga leaves the love gift of a mirror for the wife of a peasant. The husband murders the shy suitor with his wife's forced compliance, and buries his remains beneath the impacted earth of his ox's byre, which is half the couple's one-room home. However, the memory of the gift remains immovably lodged in the woman's mind. Spare, disquieting, and other-worldly.