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Turkish film festival celebrated 25th edition this year.

Directorial duo Cagla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti’s drama Sibel and Tolga Karacelik’s quirky road movie Butterflies were among the top winners at the Adana International Film Festival (Sept 22-30) over the weekend.

Sibel – revolving around an ostracised, mute young woman living in a mountain village whose life is transformed when she helps an injured fugitive in hiding - won the festival’s Golden Boll for best film in the national competition focused on Turkish cinema.

Damla Sönmez won best actress for her performance as the titular Sibel, while Emin Gürsoy...

Three years ago, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s handsomely made yet exoticizing “Mustang” reinforced a Western idea of rural Turkish life and was received with general acclaim away from home, proving that a filmmaker’s local origins don’t exclude an internalized brand of orientalism. That’s even truer with “Sibel,” Çagla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti’s third feature, the first one shot in Zencirci’s country of birth. Weaving together folklore, gender roles and a fitful kind of emancipation in the story of a mute young woman desperate to counter the ostracism of her fellow villagers, the writer-director couple have created an attractive package that doesn’t hold up to close inspection. Even so, thanks to the extensive use of an intriguing whistle language, and given the way it buttresses Western narrative notions of Asia Minor, the film has a good chance of garnering international art-house attention.

The movie’s...

Reception can be pretty unreliable atop the mountains of Turkey’s Black Sea Region, so the women picking tea leaves in Çağla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti’s timely allegorical drama Sibel have resorted to another method: they whistle. Not just plain one-note chirps, but elaborate and melodic trills-packed conversations that relay anything from a heads-up to some gossip on the village newlyweds. It’s an original escamotage of guaranteed comedic effect, which the directing duo translate via subtitles. But while the community of women farmers treat it as a mere alternative to verbal chats, for one of them, 25-year-old Sibel (a terrific Damla Sönmez) whistling is the only way she can communicate.

Born mute and raised by single father Emin (Emin Gürsoy) with her younger sister Fatma (Elit İşcan), Sibel walks the remote community as a pariah who, in the kind words of fellow women farmers, brings “bad luck.” Just...