- Turkey
WINTER SLEEP
Synopsis
Aydın was once an actor. Now he runs a small hotel carved into the rock in Cappadocia, writes columns for a local newspaper and is planning a book about Turkish theatre. He also owns houses in the village, and one of his tenants is behind on the rent; when the bailiff comes to take the tenant’s television, the tenant’s son throws a stone through Aydın’s car window. Winter comes, the snow shuts the hotel in, and through the long evenings Aydın, his much younger wife Nihal and his divorced sister Necla talk to one another until nothing is left unsaid. In “Winter Sleep” (Turkey, 2014), drawing on motifs from Chekhov’s “The Wife” and a subplot from Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”, Nuri Bilge Ceylan tells of a man who considers himself kind.
The film runs 196 minutes and consists for long stretches of conversations, in which Ceylan lays open the gulf between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, in Turkey. “Winter Sleep” won the Palme d’Or and the FIPRESCI Prize in Cannes in 2014. The film was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2014.
Festival
Shown at the 2014 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.
