Having just won the Palme d’Or for his previous film, Winter Sleep, it was likely the jury wasn’t going to give Nuri Bilge Ceylan the same prize for his new film The Wild Pear Tree, even if it was among the most acclaimed of Cannes Film Festival. In fact, the Turkish director went home empty-handed following the Cannes ceremony, but that doesn’t matter so much when a great film awaits us. Although the drama about a writer returning home to reconnect with his father is still awaiting U.S. distribution, it’ll arrive in Turkey this week, and so the first trailer has arrived.
Rory O’Connor said in his rave review, “As with much of Ceylan’s work, the majority of The Wild Pear Tree is heavy on dialogue — not in the meandering Richard Linklater sense, but in a more impenetrable, academic way. It is essentially cinema as conversation, and these conversations come in dense chunks, as when Sinan meets a popular local writer and exasperates and antagonizes him with questions about his work or, later (in what is the film’s most exhausting sequence), as Sinan and two old friends walk around eating apples and talking about faith. A lot of the time, this feels like self-reflection. Sinan is constantly attempting to get his book funded by local officials, only to be continuously denied because his work, as they see it, has little value for tourists. Ceylan is Turkey’s most celebrated living filmmaker; we can only imagine similar pressures have been placed on him.”
See the first trailer and a new poster below.
The Wild Pear Tree opens on June 1 in Turkey and is awaiting U.S. distribution.