Tereddüt

Turkish writer-director Yeşim Ustaoğlu offers a parallel study of two women – a psychiatrist with a long-time live-in partner and a wife in a conservative, nearly tyrannical household – in this study of the possibilities and limitations that exist for women in Turkey today. In her most politically charged film to date, Turkish writer-director Yeşim Ustaoğlu revisits her previous films’ themes of alienation and the longing to escape, viewing them through a distinctly female lens. In Clair Obscur, a film about the lives of two women from opposing worlds, Ustaoğlu explores the different possibilities and limitations that exist for women in Turkey today. […] As Ustaoğlu intercuts and eventually intersects Chenaz and Elmas’ stories, we begin to understand that their lives may have more in common than it appears at first glance. (Kerri Craddock, Toronto International Film Festival)