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The Wild Pear Tree Ahlat agaci

Nuri Bilge Ceylan / Turkey, North Macedonia, Germany, France, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina / 2018 / 188 min / Turkish

An intricate tapestry of social relations in rural Turkey, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest offering focuses on young people torn between idealistic pursuit of dreams and painful resignation to fate. 

festivals, awards Cannes 2018, Sydney 2018, Melbourne 2018

Sinan, an ambitious graduate and would-be writer comes back to his rural village with a diploma but no job. Now he has to decide whether to take the exams to be a teacher like his old man. Lack of money drives him back home, to a family being destroyed by his father Idris' gambling habit. The respect they once enjoyed in the village has eroded to finger-pointing and open demands for the repayment of loans. He senses defeat and disappointment with life in some of those local friends and family he has left behind – or is it that he has projected on to them his own dread of a failure yet to come.

"This film attempts to tell the story of a young man who senses with a feeling of guilt that he is different in a way that he cannot come to accept, that he is being dragged towards a destiny that he cannot embrace, as well as the rich mosaic of people surrounding him, without favouring or being unfair to anybody. As the saying goes, ‘what a father keeps hidden is revealed in the son’. One cannot help but inherit certain traits from one’s father: weaknesses, habits, tics, among other things. The film tells the story of a boy being inevitably dragged into the same destiny as his father, in a plot loaded with painful experiences." (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Born in 1959 in Istanbul, Bilge Ceylan is considered one of the greatest European cinema revelations of the late 1990s. Distant, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, launched the director’s international career. His following films also attracted notice at Cannes; Once Upon a Time in Anatolia received the Grand Prix, and Winter Sleep won the coveted Palme d’Or in 2014.

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