Like mother, like daughter in Turkish cinema

"Some say 'like mother, like daughter' about the fate of any girl. But I swear to God that my little girl's fate will be nothing like mine." This week's new release "Misafir" (Visitor) by Mehmet Eryılmaz takes a look at a young woman's painful relationship with her mother as she clutches onto her own daughter. After being thrown out of her parental home 10 years earlier, Zümrüt Erkin's Nur returns home to reconcile with her dying mother; but the underlying story of incest in the family makes reconciliation all the more painful. 
"Misafir" won the FIPRESCI Prize for World Competition and Special Grand Prize of the Jury at last year's Montréal World Film Festival.

The mother-daughter relationship has been at the core of many award winners in Turkish cinema in recent years, mostly by women directors of high caliber. Senem Tüzen's recent award winner at the Istanbul Film Festival, "Ana Yurdu" (Motherland) is a haunting look at a mother-daughter relation at its darkest. The film follows Nesrin, played by Esra Bezen Bilgin, as she turns her back on her middle-class urban life in Istanbul after a divorce. She goes to the village of her deceased grandmother to live a childhood dream and finish her novel.

Confrontation with her past comes in the form of her conservative, unhinged mother (Nihal G. Koldaş) as she takes her place near Nesrin. The two embark on a dark journey as the mother and daughter face the demons of their past. Tüzen had said that she wanted "to explore the nature of the mother-daughter relationship while examining the specific psychological complexities one faces as a daughter in Turkish society."

Deniz Akçay Katıksız's award-winning 2013 debut feature "Köksüz" (Nobody's Home) follows the lives of a broken family, trying to...