One positive outcome of the war on Iraq might be to promote interest in that part of the world, and not just for the oil. The cinema and the culture of our sometime ally Turkey is represented locally this week in the Second Turkish Film Festival, at the Museum of Fine Arts. Too bad they couldn’t have gotten the attention two years ago when the debut Turkish festival offered a richer, more varied selection.

More numerous, too: only five films are scheduled this time around as opposed to nine before. Two of those in the new series are by Zeki Demirkubuz, whose The Third Page, in the first festival, showed originality, imagination, and talent. Since then, however, he must have signed up for Existentialism 101, because his newest works exude a weary air of ennui, absurdity, and nihilism. Demirkubuz nonetheless brings to this familiar material a stylistic energy and passionate commitment that prove he’s an artist worth watching.

The two films are part of an unfinished " Tales About Darkness " trilogy. Fate (2001; April 18 at 7:30 p.m., with the director present) is inspired by Albert Camus’s The Stranger but starts out reminiscent of Jonathan Parker’s fine recent adaptation of Herman Melville’s " Bartleby the Scrivener. " Instead of Bartleby’s catchphrase " I would prefer not, " Musa, a clerk in a customs office, responds to every intrusion into his life with " It doesn’t matter. "

His mother dies, he gets married, his wife cheats on him, he’s accused of murder — it doesn’t matter. Should it matter to anyone else? Demirkubuz’s long takes, minimal dialogue, and technique of having much of the action take place between cuts or off frame inject dread and tension and a taste of the void into the proceedings, but in the end he succumbs to blather. Musa and the DA have a long chat about freedom, fate, human nature, and the like (DA: " Your case reminds me of this French novel I’ve been reading . . .  " ) that makes the Absurd seem, well, absurd.

Having completed the Camus portion of the course, we move on to Sartre and his notion that Hell is other people. Things matter all too much to the hero of Confession (2001; April 19 at 1 p.m., with the director present), a flush businessman who’s tormented by the suspicion that his wife is cheating on him. And well he might be concerned: she cheated on his best friend years ago — with him — and his friend committed suicide. As the Bergmanesque psychodrama plays out, the confession of the title comes from an unexpected source; the resolution is punishing and desperate but also life-affirming. Powerful performances from the cast and taut directorial control make this an emotionally exhausting workout.

Director Ümit Ünal continues the existential theme by quoting from Kafka’s " The Penal Colony " for the epigraph of his 9 (2002; April 25 at 8 p.m.). A lurid crime rocks a quiet Istanbul neighborhood: the brutal rape and murder of a mentally unstable drug addict. Ünal intercuts the videotaped police interrogations of half a dozen local witnesses and/or suspects, and the glib tapestry of monologues discloses an ugly microcosm of Turkish society. And who is the killer? Unlike Fate, which gets overly explicit at the end, 9 concludes with ambiguity and suggestiveness, its greatest virtues.

Where is the oneiric imaginativeness of Omër Kavur’s Journey on the Hour Hand or the lucid, rustic realism of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Clouds of May from two years ago? In lieu of the latter we have Barıs Pirhasan’s lush and dull Summer Love (2001; April 16 at 8 p.m. and April 26 at 3 p.m.). Esma, a headstrong 13-year-old, is sent to her country cousins during the summer in the hope that her grades will improve, and there she gets involved with headstrong Saliha, who wants to sell her land and head to Ankara with her much younger paramour. Esma, though, thinks Saliha’s beau fancies her. Seen through Esma’s eyes, the film is perhaps necessarily confusing, but I could have done with fewer relatives, subplots, and shots of tractors and livestock.

A counterpart to Summer Love is Buket Alakus’s My Mother (2001; April 17 at 8 p.m., with the director present), in which the country girl goes to the city — in this case, Hamburg. On one particularly bad morning, Anam, a cleaning woman, discovers that her husband has been cheating on her and that her son is a junkie. So together with her multicultural co-workers she sets out to rescue her son and liberate herself from patriarchal oppression. With the help of a handgun in her purse and a friendly local cop who pops up whenever needed, Anam proves up to the challenge. Not so the film, which careers wildly in tone (a bliss montage of the Anam and her girlfriends dancing is followed by a misery montage of messy drug withdrawal) and has a weakness for Hollywood clichés. Cultural exchange is one thing; abject assimilation is too much.