This 1989 movie from Turkish director Tunç Basaran is a gentle and touching but also energised and emotionally urgent piece of work, whose cast present themselves to the audience with a rough-and-ready immediacy, like a theatrical company. But there’s no question as to the star turn: a rather amazing performance from five-year-old newcomer Ozen Bilen as Baris, a wide-eyed little boy who is sent to a women’s prison with his mum Fatma (Füsun Demirel) after Turkey’s 1980 military coup.

Fatma has been convicted for drug-smuggling and now, lethargic and embittered, has not much time for Baris who wanders freely around the shabby hallways and into the bathrooms and dormitory cells. He forms a poignant attachment with Inci (Nür Surer), a political prisoner whose own loneliness finds a heartbreaking expression in her quasi-maternal relationship with this vulnerable child. The movie is recalled in flashback, as Inci (now released) looks over the hills of Ankara and remembers how she promised young Baris that her spirit would fly over the prison like a kite.

In the prison, the politicals mix freely with what in Ireland might be called ODCs or Ordinary Decent Criminals, although it’s the state authorities who look indecent; the male governor is pompous and tyrannical, with a Stalinesque or Stasi-like habit of making a subordinate do something, getting a second subordinate to check that the first subordinate is doing it and then a third subordinate to ensure the second is doing the checking. Innocent Baris learns how to say words he hears from the grownups like “communist” and “slander”, has a ringside seat at ferocious arguments and brawls but also has life-changing experiences in jail, such as circumcision.

This is a film which in some ways could be put alongside Empire of the Sun, another story about a child’s paradoxically liberating experience of imprisonment, yet there is real heartbreak in Inci leaving Baris behind in jail.

• Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite is on Mubi from 23 November.