Too many reviews of this critics’ fave want to apologize for the demands it puts on the viewer, but I could have taken another 30 minutes of Dust Cloth, which follows the travails of two Kurdish cleaning women in a city, Istanbul, that will never really welcome them. Hatun is the more sardonic of the two and definitely better equipped to claw her way into a nicer neighbourhood while steeling herself against the daily indignities levelled by her clients. But it’s Nesrin who draws us in with an aura of incipient tragedy that starts with the disappearance of her apparently no-good husband (and father to their child), then gets worse by degrees. As played by the astonishing Asiye Dinçsoy, she’s a frumpy Modigliani model in sweatpants and a permanent expression of fear mingled with unconquerable despair. You can’t tear your eyes away, all the way to a heartbreaking finale that you knew was coming, right?

Georgia Straight, June 2017