A young art teacher hopes to be transferred to Istanbul after completing his mandatory duty in a remote village school in Anatolia. After accusations of inappropriate contact with a student surface, his hopes of escape fade and he descends further into an existential crisis.
Direction
Ceylan's static frames turn ordinary rooms into psychological battlefields.
Writing
Dinner scene monologues that eviscerate pretension with surgical precision.
Cinematography
Snow-covered Anatolia as beautiful and indifferent as the cosmos.
Director
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Deniz Celiloğlu
Samet
Merve Dizdar
Nuray
Musab Ekici
Kenan
Ece Bağcı
Sevim
Erdem Şenocak
Tolga
Yüksel Aksu
Vahit
Münir Can Cindoruk
Feyyaz
Onur Berk Arslanoğlu
Principal Bekir
Yıldırım Gücük
Director of Education
Cengiz Bozkurt
Nail
S. Emrah Özdemir
Sergeant
Elif Ürse
Assistant Principal Saime
Elit Andaç Çam
Firdevs
Nalan Kuruçim
Kevser
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Merve Dizdar became the first Turkish woman to win Best Actress at Cannes for this role; her 40-minute dinner scene was shot in a single take.
Ceylan deliberately cast non-professionals from the actual village, then had his actors improvise within scripted boundaries—blurring documentary and fiction like Samet's own self-mythologizing.
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