Recensioni de* critic*

It is here that the film finds its substance, focusing not simply on the ugliness of life but on Hayat's capacity for survival, on her toughness and the inspiration she takes from her beautiful natural surroundings.

...It’s an exercise in miserablism, notable more for its audacious narrative repetition and an inventive approach to the relationship between sound and image than for its rather hackneyed social and psychological observations. The final few minutes, vividly evoking a sense of liberation, display Erdem’s technical expertise but, in terms of drama, feel arbitary and unearned.

Though a thoroughly idiosyncratic work obsessed with the miseries of children bordering on adolescence [...] the tormented tension that My Only Sunshine sustains reflects a tendency in several Turkish films at the festival [28th Istanbul Film Festival] to pose contrasts, not only between adolescence and adulthood or generations, but between urban and rural life, superstition and enlightenment, and tradition and modernity.

Reha Erdem confirms himself beyond any doubt as a very modern talent, defining his cinematic sensibility; any single movement of his camera reveals a precise intention and narrative strategy. Moreover, the filmmaker imposes a perfect harmony to any single image, its colors are bright and his framing is often breathtakingly beautiful.

“My Only Sunshine” is a maddeningly elliptical tale that treats its characters and the audience with equal contempt. That it does so with rapturously beautiful lensing only adds to the frustration, as if acclaimed helmer Reha Erdem were arrogantly challenging the viewer to praise his story of a young girl’s emotional and sexual violation solely on the basis of astonishing visuals.