The 13th Annual Boston Turkish Film Festival kicks off today with the latest work by award-winning filmmaker Reha Erdem. It’s a fine start, a film of grave yet limpid beauty.

JÎN — named after its teenaged protagonist — is a kind of guerrilla travelogue set in southeastern Turkey, where Kurdish separatists wage a chronic, low-level (but lethal enough) war of independence against Erdogan’s iteration of the Turkish state. But it becomes a good deal more than that when Jîn strikes out into the forest alone, feeling constrained by her community of rebels and seeking to establish an identity of her own. As Jîn develops an empathic relationship with her environment by forming bonds with the creatures of the forest, the film takes on a hushed, almost magical quality that may remind some viewers of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work. Consistently absorbing, at times even transfixing, JÎN brings a poetic intensity to its study of the self in nature, and the nature of war.

A discussion with the director will follow the screening, and a reception at the SMFA will follow the discussion.

See the trailer here

3/20 – 7:30pm
122 minutes
Remis Auditorium, 161
Museum of Fine Arts
$10 MFA members, seniors, students
$12 Everybody else