Film
The Wild Pear Tree
Ahlat Ağacı
Sinan comes home to Çanakkale from university with a manuscript nobody wants to fund and a low opinion of almost everyone he meets, including his father, a village teacher whose gambling has cost the family whatever standing it had. Three hours of argument, in the best sense.
About
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's follow-up to the Palme d'Or-winning Winter Sleep ran 188 minutes and competed at Cannes in 2018, where it was the last film to screen in competition. Like all his work since Climates, it was written with Ebru Ceylan, and it belongs to the same project: long conversations, in landscape, between people who cannot afford their own convictions.
Doğu Demirkol plays Sinan, a graduate returning to his home town near Troy with a book manuscript and no money to print it, cataloguing the failures of everyone around him — chiefly his father İdris, played by Murat Cemcir, a teacher whose gambling debts have made the family name a local joke. The film moves through a series of extended encounters, with an imam, a local author, a girl from school, each of which is really an argument about what a person owes the place that produced them.
Gökhan Tiryaki shot it across the seasons, and the autumn light does as much characterisation as the script. Reviews were strong — a 4.03 Letterboxd average from 44,000 ratings, high for a three-hour Turkish drama — and Turkey submitted it for the Academy Awards. Of Ceylan's late films it is the warmest, which is not the same as saying it is kind.
Where to Watch
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Streaming availability via JustWatch. Last checked 2026-08-30.
Top Cast
Doğu Demirkol
Sinan
Murat Cemcir
İdris
Bennu Yıldırımlar
Asuman
Hazar Ergüçlü
Hatice
Serkan Keskin
Süleyman
Awards, Festivals & Mentions
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Nominee — Palme d'Or — Cannes Film Festival (2018)
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Cannes Film Festival 2018 — In Competition
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Turkey's submission for Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film (2019)
