Distant

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant (Uzak) won the Grand Prix and the Best Actor prize (jointly for both leads) at Cannes 2003. The film consolidated Ceylan as the most internationally significant Turkish filmmaker of his generation — a position he had begun building with Clouds of May (1999) and Small Town (1997) and which would steadily expand through Climates (2006), Three Monkeys (2008), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Winter Sleep (2014, his eventual Palme winner).

Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), a successful but emotionally inert Istanbul photographer in his forties, reluctantly allows his distant provincial relative Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) — newly unemployed after the closure of the Black Sea factory where he worked, hoping to find merchant-marine work in Istanbul — to stay with him through a particularly bitter winter. Across the weeks that follow the two men's quietly crushing failure to communicate becomes the film's central subject. Mahmut watches Tarkovsky's Stalker on his television; Yusuf watches television from the next room.

The film is shot in the Istanbul snow of one of the city's coldest recent winters, in long static takes and patient framings. Ceylan was his own cinematographer and editor on this film, as he frequently has been across his career. Mehmet Emin 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; the win became one of the more-discussed tragic moments of the festival's recent history.