Distant

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant (Uzak) won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2003, along with the Best Actor prize, which its two leads shared. It confirmed Ceylan as the most internationally significant Turkish film-maker of his generation, a position he had begun to build with Clouds of May (1999) and Small Town (1997) and would extend through Climates (2006), Three Monkeys (2008), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Winter Sleep (2014), which finally won him the Palme.

Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), a successful but emotionally inert Istanbul photographer in his forties, reluctantly lets a distant provincial relative, Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), stay with him through a particularly bitter winter. Yusuf lost his job when the Black Sea factory where he worked closed, and he hopes to find work on a merchant ship out of Istanbul. Over the weeks that follow, the two men's crushing failure to communicate becomes the film's real subject. Mahmut watches Tarkovsky's Stalker on his television; Yusuf watches television from the next room.

It was shot in the Istanbul snow of one of the city's coldest recent winters, in long static takes and patient framings, with Ceylan acting as his own cinematographer and editor, as he often has across his career. Toprak, Ceylan's cousin in real life and a frequent presence in his earlier films, died in a car accident on the way to receive the Cannes Best Actor prize, and the win became one of the more painful moments in the festival's recent history.