Returning to Cannes Film Festival with his first film in five years, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses is surprisingly not the longest film in competition, thanks to Wang Bing getting a slot, but it is one of the most acclaimed. Clocking in at 3 hours and 17 minutes, the film follows the young art teacher Samet “who is finishing his fourth year of compulsory service in a remote village in Anatolia. After a turn of events he can hardly make sense of, he loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in. Will his encounter with Nuray, herself a teacher, help him overcome his angst?” Following the film’s premiere and ahead of our review arriving shortly, the first teaser trailer has now arrived which thankfully does not need subtitles.
“What has driven me to form a narrative through the experiences of an art teacher in the midst of his compulsory service in Turkey’s Eastern Anatolian region was mainly the idea that such a subject could present a rich motley of situations and events that could provide room for discussions on basic concepts that, in our country, continuously confront us as the principal dichotomies, like good versus evil, and individualism versus collectivism,” the director said.
Watch below, along with the Cannes Film Festival press conference.
