Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Colour, 35 mm
Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2011, 157 min
Section: Horizons

About the film

Turkey’s most distinguished contemporary director returned to Cannes this May to compete with his new film, a work eagerly awaited particularly by the critics. In the extensive prologue to his "metaphysical road movie,” Ceylan introduces a group of men searching on a dark and blustery night for a dead body buried somewhere along the deserted mountain roads of southern Anatolia. Prosecutor Nusret, police commissioner Naci and Dr Cemal have dragged Kenan along with them in the hope he’ll be able to show them where he hid the body. In this, his sixth film, Ceylan again has no intention of pandering to the viewer, who has to figure out the film’s time frames and sequence of events for himself. In this unconventional crime story, whose entrancing visuals, as in Ceylan’s previous works, betray the Turkish filmmaker’s passion for photography, a series of seemingly insignificant details captures the perceptive viewer’s attention by casting a dusky light on the crime itself and on the motives which led to its perpetration.

About the director

Nuri Bilge Ceylan (b. 1959, Istanbul) graduated in electrotechnical engineering at Bosphorus University and subsequently studied film for two years at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul. He made the short film Cocoon (Koza, 1995), which he followed up with the feature films affiliated in his "quest trilogy” – The Small Town (Kasaba, 1997), Clouds of May (Mayis sikintisi, 1999) and Distant (Uzak, 2003). He turned out the film Climates (Iklimer) in 2006. His film Distant took away the Grand Prix from Cannes, where his Three Monkeys (Üç maymun) won Best Director in 2008. The Small Town, Distant, Climates and Three Monkeys have all been screened at Karlovy Vary. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia won the Grand Prix ex aequo at this year’s Cannes IFF together with the Dardenne brothers’ film The Kid with a Bike.