Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, selected as Turkey’s official submission to the 2024 Academy Awards® for Best International Feature Film, will make its US theatrical premiere at the Film Forum in New York City.
Starring Deniz Celiloğlu (Samet), Merve Dizdar (Nuray), Musab Ekici (Kenan), Ece Bağci (Sevim), and Erdem Şenocak (Tolga), the film follows a teacher working in rural eastern Anatolia with hopes of moving to Istanbul when he is accused of abusing a student.
Release Date
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, About Dry Grasses premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where Merve Dizdar won the Best Actress award, and will open at the Film Forum in New York City on Friday, February 23, 2024.
Synopsis
In his ninth feature, Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Distant, Winter Sleep) plumbs his signature themes of moral ambiguity, desire, and discontent through the life of an 8th-grade art teacher stationed in a remote Anatolian village. Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) is his own worst enemy – at once romantic and cynical, idealistic and underachieving, intellectually ravenous and indolent. Against the backdrop of snowy vistas, an investigation into alleged misconduct, a brilliant philosophical face-off with a female colleague (Merve Dizdar), and the betrayal of a friend converge to expose the most passionate and thorny layers of human nature.
Reviews
Grading the film 4 of 5 stars in their review, Guardian wrote, “It all continues without reaching any very sensational endpoint, yet without feeling anticlimactic either. This film, so apparently forbidding and opaque the way many Ceylan films initially are, has in fact something engrossing in its garrulous and wide-ranging quality: a literary quality in fact. Ceylan endows Samet with the qualities of a wryly observant narrator, disillusioned and unsatisfied and yet generous enough in his way.”
“This is another very absorbing movie from this unique director — a Cannes Palme winner for his film Winter Sleep — who thoroughly deserves his continuing A-list status.”
Slant Magazine review rated the film 3 1/2 of 4 stars writing, “Above all, the film captures how easy it is to deposit too much hope on the few who represent dissent, or freedom, when one is trapped. For About Dry Grasses, consistent with Ceylan’s previous film, The Wild Pear Tree, is essentially a story about being stuck: in a desolate place, a soul-destroying job, a broken body, an oppressive classroom, or a traumatic childhood.”
“About Dry Grasses’s duration and Ceylan’s novelist’s ability to interweave interlocking narrative layers helps to keep the film from ever seeming topical. Ceylan develops the many moving threads and contradicting ends that make up a person’s life with delicate precision. Samet is portrayed as an assemblage of complicated parts. The institutional drama is only one of his preoccupations, along with the inability to find an audience for his insightful musings, an outlet for his artistic needs, a remedy for desolation and the suspicion of having botched his existence.”
Official Trailer
Watch the official trailer for About Dry Grasses
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