Song of My Mother': Sarajevo Review

Prize-winning family drama about Kurdish refugees in modern-day Istanbul suffers from an excess of understatement

A moving meditation on love, memory and cultural identity set among the Kurdish community in contemporary Turkey, Song of My Mother struck gold last week at the 20th annual Sarajevo Film Festival, taking home the big prizes for best film and best actor. This bittersweet family drama is an impressively mature feature debut from writer-director Erol Mintas, who only scraped together the final postproduction costs using crowdsourced donations.