The Cinematic Landscapes of Nuri Bilge Ceylan

A multiple prizewinner at the Cannes Film Festival, the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the most renowned names in world cinema. His contemplative visual aesthetic draws from Tarkovsky and Ozu while his doleful narrative style owes more to the Russian literary masters.

A few brief stints as a professional photographer and an actor later, he made his first short film, Koza/Coccoon, in 1995. It became the first Turkish short film selected to the Cannes film festival where he would win the top prize, the Palme d'Or, two decades later for his seventh feature film, Winter Sleep. Choosing characters from the many layers of Turkish society, he relentlessly explored the human psyche to look at the tensions outside in his long films like Uzak/Distant (2002), Climates (2006), Three Monkeys (2008) and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) that have made Ceylan one of the finest filmmakers in the world today. His newest film, About Dry Grasses, tells the story of an art teacher doing compulsory teaching service in a school in the Eastern Anatolian region facing Kurdish separatism.

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