The Palme d'Or winner from Nuri Bilge Ceylan is set in the hilly landscape of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia, where the local celebrity, a former actor Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), owns a small hotel cut into the hillside. It’s now winter and the off-season. Aydin runs the hotel with his younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen), writes a column for the local newspaper, and is playing with the idea of producing a book on Turkish theatre.
He has also inherited local properties from his father, but leaves the business of rent collection to his agent. When a local boy, resentful of his father’s humiliation at the hands of the agent, throws a stone at a jeep whilst Aydin and his agent are driving in it, Aydin ducks out of any responsibility or involvement.
As the film progresses, the cocoon in which the self-satisfied and insular man has wrapped himself is gradually unravelled . In a series of magnificent set pieces, the film takes a close look at Aydin's interactions with his wife, his recently divorced sister, and the family of the stone-throwing boy.
Aydin is finally brought face-to-face with who and what he truly is.
PALME D'OR, CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2014
FIPRESCI PRIZE, Cannes 2014
OFFICIAL SELECTION, GALA SCREENING, LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2014
Nuri Bilge Ceylan Director
Filmography Selected
Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a Turkish film director, photographer, screenwriter and actor born in Istanbul in 1959. After several years of studying electrical engineering, he got interested in photography and cinema. He then travelled to London and Katmandu, and did eighteen months of military service, before studying filmmaking for two years at Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul. He supported himself doing commercial photography. His first short film, Koza, was shown in Cannes in 1995.
His two first features, Kasaba and The Clouds of May were shown in Berlin, but it was Uzak in 2003 that brought him international recognition. Uzak won the Cannes Grand Prix as well as the Best Actor Prize for the two main actors. Each of his subsequent features, Climates (2006, Fipresci Award), Three Monkeys (2008, Best director), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011, Grand Jury Prize), successfully premiered in the Cannes official competition.
His new film, Winter Sleep, was awarded the Palme d’Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
1995 KOZA (COCOON)
Cannes 1995 - 20 min.
1997 KASABA (THE SMALL TOWN)
Berlin 1998
1999 THE CLOUDS OF MAY (MAYIS SIKINTISI)
Berlin 2000 - Competition
2003 UZAK (DISTANT)
Cannes 2003 – Grand Prix and Two Best Actor Prizes
2006 CLIMATES (IKLIMLER)
Cannes 2006 – Competition
2008 THREE MONKEYS (ÜÇ MAYMUN)
Cannes 2008 – Best Director Prize
2011 ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (BIR ZAMANLAR ANADOLU'DA)
Cannes 2011- Grand Prix
2014 WINTER SLEEP
Cannes 2014 - Palme d'Or
★★★★★
'Winter Sleep is simultaneously both an intimate epic and meditative chamber piece, distinctly calling to mind the ‘Faith Trilogy‘ works of the great Ingmar Bergman; meticulously constructed, beautifully shot and utterly engrossing, executing its complex and digressive narrative structure to remarkable effect.'
Adam Gonet, THE ARTS SHELF
★★★★
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Palme d'Or winner WINTER SLEEP is serious and seriously good. Ceylan continues to dig with acute intelligence into the dark corners of everyday human behaviour.
Time Out London
★★★★
'This Cannes Palme d’Or winner reconfirms Ceylan as a film-maker at the peak of his powers – singular, insightful, compassionate. A powerful meditation upon guilt.' Mark Kermode
, The Observer★★★★★
'In Winter Sleep Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan, of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Cannes Grand Jury prize), has made another testing marathon about human beings marooned in humanity. Again it’s glorious; again it’s talky; again its insights sear; again its length is remorseless. Again it’s the best thing to be seen in any city or country where it’s showing.'Nigel Andrews,
The Financial Times★★★★
'..this is more fiendishly intelligent stuff from the director, nudging back the limits of what we expect of cinema and also what it expects of us: a mighty tale of what becomes of a man when his heart goes into hibernation.'
Robbie Collin,
The Daily Telegraph★★★★★
'Winter Sleep requires commitment, but rewards with deep satisfaction.'Kate Muir,
The Times★★★★
'Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep is a huge, sombre and compelling tragicomedy set in Turkey’s vast Anatolian steppe'Peter Bradshaw,
The Guardian'This year's Palme d'Or winner is a slow burning but very powerful drama.'
★★★★
Geoffrey Macnab,
The Independent★
★★★1/2
Wordy and philosophical - like Ibsen or Chekhov a la Turk...the work of a seriously gifted director.'
RTE.IE★
★★★THE IRISH TIMES
★★★★★
THE IRISH INDEPENDENT ★★★★★
'...the acting is sublime, with director Nuri Bilge Ceylan able to contrast staggering, almost alien landscapes with scenes as intimate as anything on the West End stage.'
Damon Wise,
Radio Times★
★★★
'Turkish Delight.' An intimate epic, Winter Sleep is right up there with the Turkish director's best.' James Mottram,
Total Film
★★★★
'A perfectly played, beautiful-looking, exquisitely nuanced picture. As the temperature drops outside, tensions boil inside...Would make a great, if gruelling, decaying-wedlock double bill with Gone Girl.'
Ian Freer, Empire
★★★★★
'
Winter Sleep is a quiet masterpiece that uncovers the hypocrisy of its players and is never anything less than mesmerising.'
Ben Nicholson,
Cine-vue★★★★★
'Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes Palme d'Or winner is huge in every sense...It’s like one of the great Russian novels...a visual feast that takes in exotic rock formations and muddy roads, wild horses galloping freely, and later in the film blanketing snow...Winter Sleep is a masterpiece, and one that wears its length lightly.'Tom Birchenough,
The Arts Desk★★★★★
'Poignant and intelligent drama carefully spread over the course of 196 mesmerising minutes...the dialogue is so rich and literary, the ideas so fascinating and the interactions so completely credible that Ceyland's 7th film is never short of enthralling.'Emma Simmonds,
The List
★★★★★
'A masterpiece...Ceylan has crafted a multi-layered, deeply human story.'
Jordan McGrath, Verite Film Magazine
★★★★★
'For my money, it's a top-to-bottom majestic work, a strange and captivating film that has the audacity, like its ensemble of characters, to make mistakes and proceed onward, reaching out in the fire-lit night in search of greater, warmer epiphanies.'
Michael Pattison, Grolsch Filmworks
'This Turkish drama is a serious and seriously good film from Palme d'Or winning Nuri Bilge Ceylan'
Dave Calhoun, Time Out London
★★★★★
Dog And Wolf
'
Nuri Bilge Ceylan is at the peak of his powers with Winter Sleep, a richly engrossing and ravishingly beautiful magnum opus that surely qualifies as the least boring 196-minute movie ever made. Following Ceylan’s sublime 2011 drama “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” this equally assured but considerably more accessible character study tunnels into the everyday existence of a middle-aged former actor turned comfortably situated hotel owner — and emerges with a multifaceted study of human frailty whose moral implications resonate far beyond its remote Turkish setting'.
Justin Chang, Variety
'Openly indebted to Chekhov and reminiscent in certain respects of late Ingmar Bergman, the film is a tour de force of writing, acting and subtly meticulous mise-en-scène as it steadily and surely makes its mesmerising way through a maze of deftly interwoven themes. Gorgeous to look at, and packed with astute psychological, social and ethical insights...'Geoff Andrew,
Sight and Sound
'A beast, a beauty, a castle in the snow. Winter Sleep, the new film from the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan, has all the key components of a fairy-tale, but its magic blows through the film in whispering breaths, raising the hairs on your arms even as you barely notice the air’s movement.
This is a beautiful, bold, intently serious film about a failing marriage in a mountaintop hotel on the Anatolian steppe: think The Shining as retold by Chekhov, without the axe and spooks.'
Robbie Collin The Daily Telegraph
' . ..a deeply felt, powerfully delivered, observation on Turkish society, with reflections that could easily resonate everywhere else as well.”
Dan Fainaru, Screen International
'Long, marvellous, slyly lacerating conversation scenes – Bergman meets Chekhov – unspool in the hotel’s cave-like, lamplit rooms. Unlike Socrates, Ceylan’s hero comes to learn it’s the over-examined life – or the over-planned one like his own – that is not worth living. All the main characters live flawed existences gnawed by inauthenticity: they need the shock, or adrenaline shot, of other people’s hatred or criticism. In the last hour the action breaks free and roams the countryside, seeking catharsis, even a redemptive, epiphanic comedy'.
Nigel Andrews, Financial Times
'The esoteric world of masterful Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan proves as vibrant and uneasy as ever in Winter Sleep, a Chekhovian meditation on a marriage that returns to the mood of the director’s early films like Climates and Clouds of May'.
Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter
' In fits and starts, this is a stunning picture. At its best, Winter Sleep shows Ceylan to be as psychologically rigorous, in his way, as Ingmar Bergman before him'.
Xan Brooks, The Guardian
'A mesmerizing, superbly acted portrait of a wealthy, self-involved landowner and the various figures impacted by his reign, the movie marks the director's talkiest achievement. Always a novelistic filmmaker in structure, Ceylan has made his most literary work... "Winter Sleep" is both subdued and rich in details, its plot growing slowly over a series of extensive conversations. It's a robust, challenging experience he's been building toward with his previous features, as well as an adventurous step above them.'
Eric Kohn, Indiewire
