Winter Sleep

Synopsis

We [Ceylan and his wife Ebru] started with the characters and then followed the story as well. It’s a very complicated scriptwriting process. We just talk first, for a month maybe. Then we begin to decide the ‘skeleton’. Then we start dialogue. It is especially difficult because we write the dialogue separately. She writes her version; I write mine – then we discuss it. Sometimes what she wrote surprised me. Sometimes what I wrote surprised her. We discuss and fight about it in the end. — Nuri Bilge Ceylan Aydin, a retired actor running a hotel in the remote, lunar countryside of Cappadocia, maintains varying degrees of distance – from his young wife and divorced sister, from the impoverished tenants in the run-down properties he inherited, and even from his own wishes. He is not a physically brutal man, but as an actor who controlled his stage-reality, he forgets that he cannot control the people in his life. With a slight nod to some characters from Chekov’s short stories, Ceylan has crafted a mesmerizing portrait of a man removed from the exciting and rewarding life he once knew in Istanbul.  Winner of Palme D’Or at Cannes.

Listed at AFS

Archived on the AFS site between Thu, Jul 7 2022 and Tue, Sep 16 2025, across 5 captures. These dates are inferred from Wayback Machine captures and may not be accurate.