Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

A prosecutor, a doctor, a police chief and two suspects spend a night searching the steppe for a body. The suspect cannot remember exactly where he buried it, so the group stops at every new tree and looks. The film is not interested in solving the killing; the narrative makes the hours in the cars and fields, the ordinary things people say, and the private weight each of them carries its real subject. The doctor's silent decision about what to put in his autopsy report holds all the film's moral weight. Nuri Bilge Ceylan directed; it shared the Grand Prix at Cannes. It was shot in Anatolia, largely at night and in natural light. Before watching: it runs two and a half hours with very little plot. The slowness is not a fault but the narrative itself, and it asks for patience.