Directed by Reha Erdem. Starring Ali Bey Kayali, Elit Iscan, Ozakan Ozen, Ozkan Ozen, Selma Ergec, Tarik Sonmez Club, IFI, Dublin, 111 min ****

ON PAPER this extraordinary Turkish film reads like a slice of dusty realism in the vein of Abbas Kiarostami and his fellow Iranian pioneers, but, despite the intimacy of its concerns, it turns out to have an epic sweep that elevates its status beyond that of folk cinema.

Times and Winds, the fourth feature from Reha Erdem, concerns itself with the discontents of three children in a remote, robustly attractive corner of the director's homeland. A tearful fellow named Yakup (Ali Bey Kayali) nurses a debilitating crush on his schoolteacher. Yildiz (Elit Iscan), an intelligent girl with a watchful face, takes care of her baby brother and faces up to certain unhappy truths about a woman's place in this society. Ömer (Özkan Özen) develops an overpowering - indeed, somewhat irrational - hatred of his father, the town's iman, and begins plotting ways to murder him. All this happens within a structure defined by the five daily calls to prayer of the Islamic faith.

Calling to mind recent films by Carlos Reygadas and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Times and Windsuses wildly dramatic gestures to accompany the least spectacular of events. While a Steadicam follows Yildiz through the crumbling clay buildings and rustling fields, the swelling chords of Arvo Pärt's Te Deuminject both tension and foreboding into proceedings. Similar occidental melodies accompany Yakup's lonely wanderings and Ömer's developing neuroses, and - fighting for space with the artificially heightened twittering of birds - they form part of a sound design that has more to do with expressionism than Kiarostami's class of naturalism.

Times and Windstells several lucid stories, but it is the film's mysteries that lodge in the brain. Every now and then, Erdem's camera will glide across a beautifully composed tableau depicting one of the children lying among encroaching plants or on a cold bed of rocks. Are they dead? Several baldly explicit explanations announce themselves, but the unavoidable impression is of a director paying homage to quiet lives that usually pass unobserved. Disturbing, seductive, poetic and terrible: the tableaux offer a concentration of this weird film's abundant pleasures.