Winter Sleep (2014, Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Tuesday 1st of July, 6pm in the Media Research Building Room 05 (Screen 1)
Join us on Tuesday 1st of July from 6pm (film starts at 6:15pm) in the Media Research Building Room 05 (Screen 1) for a screening of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep (2014). The film is 3 hours 16 minutes long so the screening will finish around 9:30pm.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the greatest directors working in world cinema today. Because his films tend to be long, languidly plotted and largely devoid of action or high drama - usually centring on the everyday dramas of ordinary people in rural Turkey - they have not yet achieve the audience they deserve. But in his four most recent films, from 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia through Winter Sleep, The Wild Pear Tree (2018) and About Dry Grasses (2023), he has reached and sustained a level of directorial mastery matched by few other current filmmakers. Despite their generally long run times - averaging around three hours - these are films with few longueurs (in Justin Chang’s review for Variety he called Winter Sleep “the least boring 196-minute movie ever made.”) Each film is sustained by a visual style of understated beauty, and by Ceylan’s brilliant writing, with fully-realised characters, spiritual depth and moral seriousness.
A recurrent theme in Ceylan’s work is characters who are critically lacking in self-knowledge, often because they are possessed by consoling self-delusions, whether about their talents, popularity or social importance. Winter Sleep is perhaps Ceylan’s most sustained and penetrating realisation of that idea. Over three hours or so, the film gradually paints a finely detailed portrait of a rural landlord who believes he is wise, cultured and intellectual, widely liked by his tenants and benevolent towards them. As psychologically acute as any Bergman film, Winter Sleep has a stronger interest in class and class division than Bergman ever did, and in fact deserves to be considered one of the all-time great films about the ruling class - up there with Citizen Kane, The Leopard and Last Year in Marienbad.