Boston Turkish Film Festival and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston are proud to present the first retrospective of Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan films in North America.
Written and Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Short / 20 min. / 1995
Cast: Emin Ceylan, Fatma Ceylan, Turgut Toprak
Koza (Cocoon) is a wordless, non-narrative succession of mystical, pastoral images. The three human characters are an old man, an old woman, and a young boy, who wander among the natural wonders and give the camera soulful looks.
Selected Festivals and Awards:
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Written by Nuri Bilge Ceylan & Emin Ceylan
85 min. / 1997
Cast: Mehmet Emin Toprak, Havva Sağlam,
Cihat Bütün
In a pastoral town in Turkey, a family goes through changes as the seasons blend into one another. In winter, the daughter and son struggle through lessons at school. Spring comes, and as the frost recedes, the children explore the natural beauty of the terrain that surrounds them.
Selected Festivals and Awards:
Written and Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
130 min. / 1999
Cast: Emin Ceylan, Muzaffer Özdemir,
Fatma Ceylan
The month of May seems to be warmer and gloomier than previous years in a small town. Everyone seems to be happy despite their small worries. However, this mood is a little disturbed by the arrival of director Muzaffer, who has decided to shoot a film in the town where he spent his childhood.
Selected Festivals and Awards:
Written and Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
110 min. / 2002
Cast: Muzaffer Özdemir, Mehmet Emin Toprak, Zuhal Gencer
After losing his factory job, Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) leaves his Turkish village and travels to Istanbul in search of work. There, he lives with his cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), a well-to-do photographer. Yusuf, who assumed it would be easy to secure a position aboard a ship, has little luck in his job search. As the days go by, Mahmut clashes with his countrified cousin over their vast differences in personality -- and, perhaps more so, their uncomfortable similarities.
Selected Festivals and Awards:
Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Istanbul, 1959) graduated from Boğaziçi University with a degree in Engineering and studied film-making for two years in Mimar Sinan University. Nuri Bilge Ceylan made his cinema debut with a low-budget but a high-impact short film, Cocoon (Koza, 1995), which tells the story of an old couple reuniting with the burden of their painful past, and was officially selected for the Short Film Competition of the 48th Cannes International Film Festival. His first feature film, The Small Town (Kasaba, 1997) brought him 18 international awards, including Caligari Prize in the 1998 Berlin Film Festival. Clouds of May (Mayıs Sıkıntısı, 1999), telling the story of a young director returning to his small town to make a film, had its world premiere in the 50th Berlin International Film Festival in 2000 and has won awards in many international competitions. Ceylan's most recent work, Distant (Uzak, 2003), was described by Variety as "an arthouse film par excellence, a consummately made study of loneliness and frustration that confirms the emerging talent of Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan" and was named as one of the best films of the decade by the Guardian. Among many others, Distant received the Grand Jury Prize and Best Actor Award in the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, and was screened in the movie theaters worldwide. All of Ceylan's films, except Cocoon, were screened in previous years at the Boston Turkish Film Festivals.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films mix honesty, sadness and humor to reflect a great appreciation for the subtleties of human relationships. He juggles varied duties for each of his films as director, cinematographer, screenwriter, producer and editor among them. Compared to Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Bresson, and Alan Resnais, Ceylan is said to have an elegant cinematography and a deeply pensive tone which remind the style of Andrei Tarkovsky, and he is described as a true auteur.