Winter Sleep

Aydın, a former stage actor who runs a hotel in Cappadocia, is both the owner of the lives around him and a stranger to them. A tenant's son throws a stone at his car, and what follows is a three-hundred-page reckoning with his wife Nihal, his sister Necla and the newspaper columns he writes. Nuri Bilge Ceylan does not hide his source. The film draws on Chekhov's novella The Wife and takes a subplot about humiliated fathers and schoolboys from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Ceylan said he had wanted to adapt Chekhov for fifteen years. He wrote it with his wife Ebru Ceylan; it was the last screenplay they wrote together. Shooting was compressed into two winter months in Cappadocia on Sony F65 cameras, with 450,000 euros from Eurimages. It runs 196 minutes. It took the Palme d'Or and the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, where jury president Jane Campion called it masterful. It was Turkey's Oscar submission but was not nominated. Metacritic 88, worldwide gross 3.7 million dollars. Who it is for: viewers who prefer long scenes and talk to plot, and readers of Chekhov. Who it is not for: anyone wanting momentum. It is three and a half hours and almost nothing happens outside rooms where people argue.