The time is out of joint for Turkey at the moment, but it’s still a country equally split between those looking to the west for the culture of ideas and the more conservative element which at least needs its voice respected. They co-exist peacefully in a great cosmopolitan city like Istanbul, which recently joined Ankara and Izmir in rejecting increased powers for its leader.

University, anyone? Student days? If you were ever an undergraduate, who does not remember the simultaneous sense of dislocation and excitement, the feeling of the familiar combined with a heady awareness that we might fall off a cliff, metaphorically speaking, at any moment?

The Armenian genocide by the Ottomans during and after World War One killed 1.5 million people and is a wound that won’t heal for Armenians, though modern-day Turkey continues to insist that no genocide occurred.

I was 11 years old when my father was killed. A body was found near the border between Turkey and Bulgaria. According to authorities it belonged to my father even though the corpse was decomposed beyond recognition. My mother and his mother were not summoned to identify the body. This tragedy happened in 1948. We still don’t know where he was buried. Therefore he does not have a grave. My mother and I waited for him for years hoping that he might appear one day. My mother died in 1999.

Sabahattin Ali was a well-known writer who had already published a volume of poetry, four volumes of short stories and three novels between 1935 and 1945 as well as numerous articles published in periodicals, newspapers, magazines and was the editor and owner of a very popular political-satirical newspaper called Marco Pasha. (Pictured below: Sabahattin Ali's Madonna in a Fur Coat)

He was born in 1907 in a town called Egridere, which used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, where his father was the Commander of the Ottoman Army Headquarters during the disastrous defeat of the Balkan War. It is now in Bulgaria and called Ardino. As a child of one war after another, Sabahattin Ali didn’t have much of a happy family life. When he was 12 years old, he was sent to a boarding Teachers’ School where he started to compose his first poems which were published in provincial literary magazines.

The young Turkish Republic was desperately in need of educators. The country has lost a whole generation of its best people during endless wars. In 1925 an Education Abroad program has been put into effect. Sabahattin Ali was one of the chosen students sent to Germany to learn the language. Between 1928 and 1930 he spent two years in Berlin and Potsdam where the political and artistic climate of the Weimar Republic was at its pinnacle. While in Germany it seems that he was artistically, politically and intellectually reborn. 

He returned to Turkey with a political awareness leaning toward Marxism and socialism. This was obviously not what the new regime expected from him. During the first years of his teaching career he was accused of inciting subversive political ideas among his students, arrested more than once and sentenced to a year in prison for a poem he allegedly wrote criticising the leader of the regime.

When he was free again he decided to get married and start a new, tame and tranquil life. My mother was an ideal choice for a man who was seeking tranquillity. They married in 1935 and I was born in 1937. We were a happy family as long as it lasted. (Pictured: Filiz Ali with her parents in a prison courtyard in 1947, after Satahattin Ali was arrested for criticising President Atatürk.)

My father was a gentle man with endless energy who talked, walked and wrote faster than anybody I know. He didn’t need solitude for reading or writing. He would read and write anywhere, any time. Even though he was frequently the life of a party, being very funny, a good mimic, imitating comic characters, telling hilarious stories, jokes, singing funny songs, he had moments of closing himself to the outer world like a clam as well. But his curiosity and hunger for knowledge was phenomenal. I am thankful that he is being rediscovered by a whole new generation now.

• Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe) is published by Penguin Modern Classics (£8.99)
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Overleaf: read the opening of Madonna in a Fur Coat

A welcome antidote to the mood of a time which seems hell-bent on closing borders and building walls, The Music of Strangers is about a unique musical collective that breaks through division and reaffirms the potential of culture to unite. Subtitled “Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble”, Morgan Neville’s film is about the band that came into being at the beginning of the millennium on the initiative of the great Chinese-American cellist, giving us snapshots from its history, as well as the stories of some of its many and varied members.

It focuses on the lives of these individuals of diverse cultural achievement and inquisitive intelligence, who came together from a variety of backgrounds in the exploratory spirit of music. Ma brought its first players together in 2000 as part of his own interest in going beyond his career as a soloist: it drew on musicians from countries along the eponymous ancient trading route which for centuries had connected East and West – among them Syria, Iran and China, players from which are featured here. Neville’s film opens with an impromptu open-air jam session on a waterside square in Istanbul, and it’s that city more than any other which embodies the coming-together of two worlds.

Culture overlaps with politics at every turn 

There can’t be any absolute qualifications for joining though, and subsequent members have appeared by recommendation, almost as friends of friends, like Cristina Pato, an irrepressible presence in the group who’s a master of the Galician bagpipe, the gaita. She is one of the four musicians Neville follows back to their points of origin. Cristina is much concerned with the continuity of Galicia’s traditional culture, while Wu Man, a virtuoso of the pipa, the Chinese lute, explores the disappearing traditions of the remote regions of her native land.

Culture overlaps with politics at every turn: Man is from the first post-Cultural Revolution generation of Chinese musicians (she featured in the 1980 Oscar-winning From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China, a loose cross-cultural documentary predecessor to this film). Kayhan Kalhor, player of the kamancheh, the Persian spiked fiddle, escaped the Iranian revolution in 1979, and his continuing engagement with his homeland is complicated. Syrian clarinettist Kinan Azmeh is cut off for the moment from his Damascus past: one of the film's many moving sequences shows him engaging children at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan in music (pictured below).

Bringing it all together is the irrepressible Ma, born in Paris, transplanted at an early age to America – we see his performance as a seven-year-old at the Kennedy White House, introduced by Leonard Bernstein, whose own search for a universal music language has surely proved an ongoing inspiration. Since then he has grown into an impish maestro, whose sense of fun suggests he doesn’t take life quite as seriously as he does art. The cellist himself isn’t the film’s main subject by any means, but The Music of Strangers offers insights into the demands made of any high-profile musician: for Ma, every journey he takes, even within America, involves an element of cultural diplomacy. He reckons he has been away from home, on tour, for roughly 22 of the 35 years of his married life: his son grew up assuming his father worked at Boston’s Logan airport, so frequently did he travel there.

We don't learn everything here, never quite seeing how the Ensemble actually works, whether through genuine jazz-style group improvisation, or if a composer or conductor sometimes plays a more decisive role. Best-known for his Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom about the world of backing musicians, Neville’s last film Best of Enemies, about the Gore Vidal-William F Buckley 1968 television debates, was certainly tighter, but The Music of Strangers plays engagingly on the inevitably picaresque nature of its subject (camerawork and editing are outstanding). We may get only a glimpse into this “Manhattan Project of music”, but it’s an energetic – and energising – journey, one that reveals much, in the broadest sense, about origins, destinations, and where we may belong.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Music of Strangers

Has any living pianist had a richer or more charmed life than Idil Biret? As a child prodigy she studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Alfred Cortot, and both there and in Germany with Wilhelm Kempff. At the age of four she was reproducing Bach Preludes and Fugues on the family piano in Ankara simply from hearing them on the radio. When she was seven the Turkish Parliament passed "Idil's Law", enabling not her but also other gifted children to study abroad.

Istanbul six weeks before the failed coup, the south-west coast of Turkey six weeks after: what's the difference? None that I could see; once past the Turkish Airlines flights, with literature and screen full of the "People's Victory", there was no sign of it at the D-Marin Classical Music Festival on the Bodrum peninsula, centred around the marina in Turgutreis, a 45-minute drive along a very built-up coastline from once-quiet Bodrum.

Flashback to 1981, when the Bolshoy Ballet danced Swan Lake Act Two to a tinny Melodiya recording in Istanbul's Open-Air Theatre (seats were cheap for Interrailing students). Turkey was friends with the Soviet Union then. It hadn't been in the 1950s, when Turkish pianist and citoyenne du monde İdil Biret was advised not to play a Prokofiev sonata in her motherland.

Teenage girls in the West who routinely abuse their parents for imposing midnight curfews, cancelling suspicious sleepovers, and insisting bra straps be concealed should hope that they are not suddenly dragged along to see Mustang. 

The epic and the intimate combine impressively in Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar’s debut feature Theeb. The epic is there is the scale of the stunning desert landscapes that are the backdrop – though the desert itself almost feels like a character here, and generic allusions to the Western abound – to his World War One story of complicated Bedouin loyalties played out on the edges of the Ottoman Empire.