Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia won the Cannes Grand Prix in 2011 (Ceylan's third major Cannes prize after Distant and Climates) and consolidated his position as the most internationally significant Turkish filmmaker of his generation. The film runs 157 minutes; almost the entire first half takes place at night.

A convoy of three cars (police, gendarmes, prosecutor, doctor, and the murderer who has agreed to lead them to the body) drives through the Anatolian steppe in search of a corpse the killer can no longer locate. As the night wears on, the men talk: about marriages, sons, deaths, professional disappointments. Ceylan and his cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki shot the search sequences across actual Anatolian steppe locations near the town of Keskin in central Turkey, working with available headlight and lantern light through long winter nights, a meditation on what the men in the cars carry, and what cannot be reported in any official statement.

Cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki produced some of the most extraordinary night-photography of the 2010s, with the convoy's headlamps lighting empty hills as a single source. The screenplay, co-written with Ercan Kesal (also playing the doctor) and Ebru Ceylan, was based on Kesal's experience as a country doctor. The film sits in the upper tier of every 2010s critics' poll.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: One of the great procedurals of recent European cinema, made by a director with the patience to let the form open into philosophy. The conversation in the village mayor's house, by lantern, is among the most beautiful sequences of the decade.