Fears that the self-consciously arty image on the poster might herald a pretentious film soon melt away in its utter beauty. Set in a small village in the north of Turkey, overlooking the Black Sea, it's an almost plotless portrait of simple, hard life and the rhythms of the days, broken into segments according to the Islamic times for Prayer (the actual meaning of the Turkish title).

Though winds are merely interpolated into the title in its English translation, they do play a great role in the film, forever blowing, tossing the olive branches, sifting through the grass meadows, lifting hair or flapping garments, blasting menacingly through open windows, and providing a constant and beguiling background sound, along with clanking goatbells, birdsong, and the strains of Arvo Part. However much he's been over-used in films over the last few years, here his warm but searing tones are a perfect match. It's a sensual dream of a film, colours - the violet haze over the sea and mountains, blue sky and green foliage - movement, textures of leaves, stony tracks and walls, faces.

But the dreamy life has its harshnesses - particularly in the lives of its children. One boy is so heartlessly disciplined and constantly denigrated by his father that he hatches plots to hurt and even kill him, from a Tristana-like opening of his bedroom window to let in the chilly wind when he is sick, to equipping himself with a knife. A girl is constantly used by her mother as a childminder of her baby sister, another boy becomes disillusioned by his once beloved father when he catches him doing something dishonourable. Parent-child relations seem always problematic, throughout the generations. Yet away from the fraught microcosms of family life, the small, poor society seems benevolent and well-ordered - an old lady is looked after by all, meat from a sacrificed goat is distributed throughout village, a young goatherd who has been beaten by his boss seems to be on the way to getting justice by the village elders.

A step too far into pure poetry are the tableaux where children are seen apparently asleep in natural settings - outside the narrative and presumably representing peace for them in a benevolent nature outside their hard lives. Beautiful images in themselves but self-conscious and unnecessary. Far more moving are the moments where we feel how much we are engaged with the lives we are watching, so that when an accident happens you're physically jolted out of your seat, and a small boy's face of utter happiness after an encounter with his beloved young teacher cuts to the heart. The director Erdem is a poet, and it shows. When he sticks to intrinsic poetry rather than imposing it he has moments of greatness.

Seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 23 September 2008