BERDEL

Remarkably, a Turkish government family-planning bureau created this haunting drama, which avoids polemics and heavy-handed propaganda as it attacks an archaic custom too often practiced in modem Anatolia. Omer is not an evil man, but the lack of a son in his large family consumes him. When his aging wife delivers their sixth daughter, Omer decides to enact berdel, the ritual swapping of his eldest girl for a secondary wife, a kuma, whose duty is to bear the desired offspring. Neither a dry lecture nor an ethnological document, the film laments the sad status of women even in a 'progressive' culture.