About Dry Grasses

The latest existential epic from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the man who has been carrying Turkish cinema for the past couple of decades, is an incredible work, slowly unravelling the network of people in a small and snowy village in the middle of nowhere. Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) and Kenan (Musab Ekici) are dissatisfied teachers who become embroiled in an overblown scandal at their school whilst also falling in love with the same woman (Merve Dizdar), whose performance saw her awarded Best Actress at Cannes. Ceylan explores these tensions between self-loathing loneliness, discontentedness, and trying to fix oneself by placing high expectations onto other people, and he does this with humour, empathy and dazzling cinematography. About Dry Grasses needs to be seen in the cinema to be fully absorbed and, although its length and depth seems daunting at first, Ceylan guides you through his film with ease, and the three hours will fly by.

Daniel Kallin