"One of the world's most accomplished filmmakers." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
"A major filmmaker, a director now fully in command of his art." - Robin Wood, Artforum
"Ceylan is making films as rewarding as any director alive." - Jonathan Romney, Screen International
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has risen to the front rank of international auteurs over the last decade. His four features and one short - muted but intense, poetic studies in solitude - place him at the forefront of a return to both humanism and an art film tradition in contemporary cinema. This retrospective, presented in our ongoing series dedicated to emerging masters, follows those dedicated to Jia Zhang-ke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Cristi Puiu, and Hong Sang-soo - a veritable elite of "film now."
When I was on the jury for the Istanbul International Film Festival in 2000, a small, unheralded film appeared out of nowhere - well, not exactly! - that struck us as truly masterful and immediately became the front runner for the Grand Prize: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's CLOUDS OF MAY. Final jury deliberations, as they are wont to do, quickly became acrimonious when one member accused us CLOUDers of being naive orientalists, duped by Istanbul exotica in our desire to laurel the local. As much as I agreed that the (big, French) film championed by the angry holdout was a total masterpiece, I sided with the hoodwinked orientalists and voted whole-heartedly for the Ceylan. Given the director's career since then - each film marking a greater mastery and more distinctive voice - we could smugly proclaim our prescience in garlanding CLOUDS, but then so did juries at half a dozen other festivals. Ceylan did not languish long before being internationally recognized as one of the great hopes of contemporary cinema.
Ceylan's Turkey, whether Anatolian village, seaside resort, or downtown Istanbul, is a terrain of eternal tristesse, of missed connections, deferred aspirations, and disappointment in life. Few directors have so poignantly caught the aloneness of people, the inviolable solitude that even the extended families of THE SMALL TOWN and CLOUDS OF MAY do little to alleviate. Marriage offers more spite than respite, as the unhappy alliances of DISTANT
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