Clouds of May

Nuri Bilge Ceylan cast his own family. His father, M. Emin Ceylan, plays Emin, and his mother, Fatma Ceylan, plays the mother. It was shot in the village of Yenice in Çanakkale province, where the director's family actually lives. The film contains a second layer of irony that is easy to miss. Emin's son Muzaffer, played by Muzaffer Özdemir, has come back to town to make a film using his own family as actors, which is precisely what Ceylan was doing while the camera was running. Emin, meanwhile, has his own war. The government intends to cut down trees on his land that have stood for more than seventy years, and he spends the film trying to stop it. The trees carry the film's argument about a rural life being outlasted by everything around it. It played in competition at Berlin and won a special jury prize for its cast at the 1999 Antalya film festival. Who it is for: viewers who want to see how Ceylan's method was built, in a film where the filmmaking and the family are the same material. Who it is not for: anyone needing incident. Almost nothing happens on purpose, the pace is that of a slow afternoon, and the non-professional performances are deliberately unpolished.