Nuri Bilge Ceylan
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Cannes 2023: About Dry Grasses, The Sweet East
Cannes official competition has grandfathered-in filmmakers—Pedro Almodóvar, the Dardennes, Arnaud Desplechin—who will keep being included no matter what, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose every feature since 2002’s Distant has premiered here, is definitely among them. After receiving the Grand Prix for 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan introduced his “three-plus-hours only” mode with 2014’s Winter Sleep and 2018’s The Wild Pear Tree, and reception was what you might call “respectfully muted.” Outside the festival, his reputation seems to have fallen off: it’s a long way from the 2007 Coen brothers short World Cinema, in which a cowboy played by Josh Brolin goes to see […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 21, 2023 -
Nuri Bilge Ceylan on Collaborative Writing, Discarding a Screenplay and Returning to Russian Literature
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2014 effort Winter Sleep won what is arguably cinema’s most coveted prize, Cannes’ Palme d’Or. Since then, he has been remarkably quiet. So it was with some anticipation that the 57-year-old Turkish director delivered a master class at Qumra, an industry event taking place in Doha at which filmmakers funded by the Doha Film Institute present their projects to the great and good of the film industry. During the master class, Ceylan revealed that he had discarded a script that he had spent a year slaving over after his Cannes victory. That was just one of many tidbits that Ceylan […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Mar 24, 2016 -
Towards the Palme d’Or: A Conversation with DP Gökhan Tiryaki On the Set of Asif Kapadia’s Ali and Nino
When you have one of the most anticipated films of the year about to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, how do you prepare? For Asif Kapadia — director of Amy, the forthcoming documentary about the British jazz singer Amy Winehouse — the answer is to direct another film. His adaptation of Kurban Said’s 1937 novel Ali and Nino is the first fictional narrative the British director has helmed since 2007’s Far North; both it and Amy are his first features since 2010’s much-admired documentary Senna. For his fictional narratives, Kapadia has made a habit of shooting in remote, unique locations. […]
by Kaleem Aftab on May 13, 2015 -
“I Always Try to Find Something Better”: Nuri Bilge Ceylan on Winter Sleep
Over the course of his seven feature films – the last five of which have won prizes at Cannes – the Turkish filmmaker and photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan has moved from a dramaturgy primarily based in photography (in films such as 2002’s Distant) to one based firmly in screenwriting, as in the elegant structure and dialogues of 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. This development as a screenwriter has been accomplished in tandem with his wife, Ebru Ceylan, with whom he has co-written the last three films. Nuri Bilge Ceylan was trained first as a chemical and then electrical […]
by David Barker on Dec 17, 2014 -
Once Upon a Time in Cappadocia: The Scaping of Winter Sleep
According to the Institutional Theory of Art, a work becomes Art only after it has been validated by institutions and other taste maintainers (festivals, exhibitions, etc.). Given that Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest film, Winter Sleep, earned him the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, you could build a case that, officially anyway, his was the best of the 2014 harvest. Now MoMA is hosting a complete retrospective October 29-November 5 of his relatively small body of work (seven features, one short). Nuri Bilge Ceylan (pronounced “noo-ree beel-gyeh jay-lan”) will be present to introduce Winter Sleep and Once Upon […]
by Howard Feinstein on Oct 28, 2014 -
Cannes Day Three: Expendables Tanks and Political Turmoil
The outside world’s political problems are intruding more than usual on the Cannes Film Festival. Some relevant items: • A few days ago, Turkish culture minister Omer Celik was excited about coming to Cannes and bullish about the development of his country’s film industry. In an interview with Variety, Celik managed to more or less duck questions about Turkey’s attempted recent bans on YouTube and Twitter (“Turkey is a country with rule of law. Access to certain social-media sites such as Twitter and YouTube has been limited on legal grounds”). But Tuesday’s deadly coal mine collapse in the city of […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 16, 2014 -
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Over the course of one long night, a cadre of lonely men — which includes an overbearing, barely competent police chief, a handsome and thorough doctor, a cautious district attorney, several drivers, civil servants, grave diggers, and two brothers accused of homicide — drive through the hills of rural Anatolia in search of a body buried at a spot the young and frightened siblings can’t quite recall. We glimpse their sorrows, their vanities, their brief bouts of interconnectedness, but mostly we watch their boredom. Still the crime gets solved, motivations are revealed, a small but significant cover-up is enacted. Along the way, […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 4, 2012 -
VIRTUE AND VICE AT THE 2011 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
Moral questions about science, war, justice, and ethics were at the forefront of some of the strongest international work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “He’s really not judgmental of his characters at all, is he?” said one party-goer of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Between bites of warm peaches and pistachio ice cream at a reception for the filmmaker’s sleek, stylish new thriller, The Skin I Live In, party-goers discussed the dark, unsettling tale of a mad scientist (played with panache by Antonio Banderas) who develops a miraculous new variety of human skin and a fraught relationship with his sad, beautiful […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on May 31, 2011 -
LIVE BLOGGING THE CANNES AWARDS CEREMONY
The Cannes Awards Ceremony has just begun, hosted by Melanie Laurent. I’ll be refreshing this page as the awards unfold. The Short Film Prize, announce by Michel Gondry, goes to Cross Country, by Ukraine’s Maryna Vroda. The Camera d’Or, given to best first film, goes to Argentinia’sLas Acacias, by Pablo Giorgelli. To the strains of Morricone’s score for Once Upon a Time in America, jury president Robert De Niro joins Laurent on stage to introduce his fellow jury members: Olivier Assayas, Uma Thurman, Johnnie To, Martina Gusman, Nansun Shi, Linn Ullman, and Mahamat Saleh Haroun. And they announce the Jury […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 22, 2011 -
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Three Monkeys
YAVUZ BINGÖL AND HATICE ESLAN IN DIRECTOR NURI BILGE CEYLAN’S THREE MONKEYS. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS. In film writing these days, superlatives like “visionary” and “genius” are thrown around all too often to describe directors, though few truly deserve them; Nuri Bilge Ceylan, however, is one of those few. The Turkish writer-director was born in 1959 in Istanbul, and started taking photographs in his mid-teens. He earned a degree in Engineering at Bo?aziçi University, but after graduating he moved on to study film, a newly discovered passion, at Mirnar Sinan University. After a ten-year period spent living in London (during which […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 27, 2009
