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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...