Nuri Bilge Ceylan

The Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (b. 1959) had his short film Cocoon selected for the 1995 Cannes Festival competition, the first Turkish short ever to achieve this distinction. Ceylan has been acclaimed at Cannes ever since: Distant won the Grand Prix in 2002, Climates (2006) the FIPRESCI prize, and Three Monkeys (2008) the Best Director award. In 2011 he won the Grand Prix again, for Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and Ceylan's 2014 film Winter Sleep won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Ceylan's low-budget, art-house cinema thrives on a tension between dedication to formal control and commitment to realistic authenticity. His films are drenched in a brooding, meditative atmosphere and anchored to a deeply intimate form of visual and aural poetry that undercuts the importance of narrative per se. In its own quiet, understated manner, Ceylan's cinema confronts the big thematic questions of all great art: what are we doing with our lives and why; how does the past influence both the present and future; how may we reconcile our desires and ideals with the disappointments of reality; how can our human relationships survive intact when people are forever being encouraged to search for something better than what they already have? Nuri Bilge Ceylan: Essays and Interviews is the first book wholly in English dedicated to this important artist's oeuvre. Included are eight interviews with Ceylan and ten essays about his films, together with a biographical introduction, full movie credits, and a bibliography. Robert Cardullo has published a number of books, among them André Bazin on French Cinema, World Directors in Dialogue, and Playing to the Camera. After taking his doctoral degree from Yale, Cardullo taught for four decades both inside and outside the United States.