The Market | Film review

In his second movie set in Turkey, the British film-maker Ben Hopkins focuses on Mihram, a handsome loser from the country's eastern borders forever devising get-rich-quick schemes, usually connected with smuggled or stolen goods. The movie, set in the mid-90s, artfully observes a society so endemically corrupt that Mihram seems like an honest man. Trying to do well by doing good, he undertakes to help a local doctor by finding black market replacements for some stolen drugs, then tries to make a little for himself on the side. Things go both right and wrong and, as a result, he ends up in the hands of the organised criminals who robbed the doctor in the first place. A satisfying if uncomfortable fable.