About Dry Grasses

Released in 2023, About Dry Grasses is the eleventh feature by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose earlier work includes Distant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and the Palme d'Or winner Winter Sleep. Co-written by Ceylan with Akın Aksu and Ebru Ceylan, the film premiered in Competition at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, where Merve Dizdar took the Best Actress prize, becoming the first Turkish performer to win the award. It later represented Turkey in the foreign-language race at the 96th Academy Awards.

Deniz Celiloğlu plays Samet, the disenchanted art teacher at the centre of the story, with Musab Ekici as his colleague Kenan and Dizdar as Nuray, the schoolteacher in a nearby village whose presence reorders the men's friendship. Cinematographer Cevahir Şahin pairs the wide steppe in winter, all dark trees and snow, with long, talk-driven interiors lit by lamps and stoves. As with previous Ceylan films, the script weaves photography, books and dinner-table monologues around moral questions that the characters interrogate at unusual length.

At 197 minutes, About Dry Grasses drew a strong critical reception in Europe, with Sight & Sound, Cahiers du Cinéma and Le Monde all placing it among the year's best, and most reviewers situating it firmly within Ceylan's mature canon. The film consolidated his standing as one of the major contemporary heirs to Chekhov on screen, a director whose long-form psychological cinema continues to find a sizeable festival audience well into its third decade.