“It had such a beautiful rhythm and it just took me in,” Jury head Jane Campion said of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Winter Sleep” after it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. “Actually I could have sat there for another two hours. It was all very Chekhovian. I could see myself in all of the characters.”
Ever since 2002, with his third feature “Distant,” Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been a constant presence at the Cannes—a new film by the director is almost a guaranteed premiere along the Croisette by now. His international acclaim has been growing for several years now, and 2011’s riveting moral drama “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” won the runner-up Grand Prix prize at the festival that year. It was really only a matter of time until Ceylan won the big prize, and he did, with this year’s “Winter Sleep.”
Examining the significant divide between the rich and poor, as well as the powerful and powerless, in Turkey, “Winter Sleep” follows an isolated actor dealing with a marital breakdown. Here’s our review and another take on the movie as it tends to divide. Here’s the official synopsis from Cannes:
Aydin, a former actor, runs a small hotel in central Anatolia with his young wife Nihal with whom he has a stormy relationship and his sister Necla who is suffering from her recent divorce. In winter as the snow begins to fall, the hotel turns into a shelter but also an inescapable place that fuels their animosities…
Adopt Films will release the lengthy film—a whopping 3-hours and 16-minutes—later this year. And for now, a new trailer has been released that shows the quiet, exacting power of this Palme d’Or winner. Watch it below.