Winter Sleep

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep (Turkish: Kış Uykusu) won the Palme d'Or at the 67th Cannes Film Festival in May 2014. It was Ceylan's first Palme after a long Cannes track record that had included the Grand Prix for Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and the Best Director prize for Three Monkeys (2008). Ceylan is the first Turkish director ever to win the Palme d'Or and remains the only one to have won the festival's top prize.

The screenplay is by Ceylan with his wife Ebru Ceylan, his regular co-writer since the early 2000s. The script is loosely adapted from three Anton Chekhov short stories (The Wife, Excellent People and The Princess) fused with original material. Ceylan has been outspoken about the influence of Chekhov, Bergman and Ozu on his methodology; Winter Sleep is widely treated as the most fully realised expression of his mature dialogue-centred style.

The cast pairs Haluk Bilginer in the central role (Bilginer is one of Turkey's most prominent stage and screen actors, having spent the 1980s in the United Kingdom in the long-running BBC soap EastEnders before returning to Turkish theatre) with Melisa Sözen and Demet Akbağ, and Ayberk Pekcan, Tamer Levent and Nadir Sarıbacak in major supporting roles. Cinematography is by Gökhan Tiryaki, Ceylan's regular collaborator. The film was shot largely in the Cappadocia region of central Anatolia in the actual cave-hotel of the Sultan Cave Suites in Göreme, with the Anatolian winter geography providing the principal visual register across the film's 196-minute running time.