By Jake Howell jake.howell@utoronto.ca

Countdown To Cannes: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Posted Tuesday, May 6th, 2014 - 2 Comments »
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The sixth in a series of snapshots outlining the nineteen directors in the 67th Palme d’Or Competition.

Background: Turkish; born in Istanbul, Turkey, 1959.

Known for / style: Kasaba (Small Town, 1997), Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys, 2008), Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 2011); extended takes with little-to-no camera movement; sprawling runtimes; scenes of deafening silence; wide or distanced shots of landscapes; domestic dramas cast with non-actors or family members; accomplished photography and screenwriting in addition to directing.

winter_sleep_3

Notable accolades: Throughout his two decades or so on the festival circuit, Ceylan (approximately pronounced “dzjay-lan”) has nearly won it all. At Cannes, he’s taken home the Grand Jury Prize twice (Uzak, 2002; Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 2011) and the Festival’s prestigious Best Director award in 2008 (Three Monkeys). At Berlin, he won the Caligari Film Award in 2008 for Small Town. He’s also a seven-time FIPRESCI Award winner from multiple festivals, a veritable hero at his local Istanbul International Film Festival, and a two-time winner of the Asia Pacific Screen Awards Achievement in Direction prize (Anatolia and Three Monkeys).

Previous Cannes appearances: Since his Competition debut in 2002 (Uzak), Ceylan has reserved his world premieres for Cannes, with Climates, Three Monkeys and Anatolia following in the same pattern. His 1995 short film Koza played in the short film Competition, and he is a two-time Jury veteran (Competition member, 2009; Cinéfondation member, 2004). In other words, 2014 will mark his fifth shot at a feature-length Palme d’Or.

Film he’s bringing to Cannes: Kış Uykusu or Winter Sleep, which may or may not refer to the film’s intimidating 196-minute run-time. “Winter Sleep is about humans,” Ceylan said in an interview with Sony’s technical side. “It’s a drama set in the middle of Turkey, in Anatolia. We captured many kinds of images on location, shooting in Cappadocia over wintertime. There are many kinds of landscapes, human-scapes and portraits, sometimes in snow, sometimes in cloudy weather and more seldomly sunny images as well.” The newly-released trailer shows Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer struggling with domestic married life.

winter_sleep Could it win the Palme? Ceylan is essentially three for four in his Cannes career. Given that the auteur’s style is tailor-made for the Palme’s proclivities, you could bet that Ceylan may be a candidate for  serious awards consideration. A full-out win at this point seems almost too obvious, so we’ll have to wait (and wait) to see. That said, do not be surprised if 2014 marks Turkey’s second Palme d’Or win, after Yılmaz Güney and Şerif Gören’s golden The Way (1982).

Why you should care:  Ceylan has helped place Turkish cinema on the international radar. It might prove difficult to get excited about a drama that’s longer than a Lord of the Rings entry, but Ceylan’s gorgeous location photography, careful consideration of pacing, and his intriguing human story should more than justify its running time. Ceylan’s masterful style is his own.

Follow Jake Howell on Twitter: @Jake_Howell
Previous Entries:
Tommy Lee Jones
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Bennett Miller
Xavier Dolan
David Cronenberg

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Posted in Cannes, Cannes Originals, MCN Originals, Movie City News | 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “Countdown To Cannes: Nuri Bilge Ceylan”

  1. Jeremy Fassler says:
    May 6, 2014 at 10:20 am

    Ugh. Ceylan is a horrible, pretentious director, whose movies are beyond boring. When will Cannes finally see that the emperor has no clothes? I saw his film, Three Monkeys, knowing nothing about it, and thought it was one of the worst films I’d ever seen – the plot outline was interesting, but all I remember is that nothing that happened in the film was related to that. He’s dreadful.

  2. Ray Pride says:
    May 6, 2014 at 10:43 am

    Oh, boo.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon