19
May
2018

Special Press Conference - Nuri Bilge Ceylan's THE WILD PEAR TREE at CANNES 2018

Nuri Bilge Ceylan and his team presented "THE WILD PEAR TREE" at the press conference in CANNES

Here are some of the comments, published by the film critics after the premiere of the film:

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The Turkish director’s unhurried, magnificently acted film follows a bumptious young writer who returns home to face bittersweet truths. The Wild Pear Tree is a gentle, humane, beautifully made and magnificently acted movie from the Turkish film-maker and former Palme winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan: garrulous, humorous and lugubrious in his unmistakable and very engaging style. It’s an unhurried, elegiac address to the idea of childhood and your home town – and how returning to both has a bittersweet savour. ~ "The Guardian", Peter Bradshaw ~

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Another visually rich chamber piece from Nuri Bilge Ceylan that builds elaborate rhetorical set pieces of astonishing density.
With “Winter Sleep,” Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan signaled a shift in style, increasing the importance of extended dialogues to the visually rich chamber pieces he plays out on grand stages. “The Wild Pear Tree” goes a step further, building elaborate rhetorical set pieces of such density that digesting them in all their intricacies at one sitting is practically impossible. Even more than in his previous film, Ceylan and his fellow scriptwriters (wife Ebru Ceylan along with Akın Aksu, also acting) develop astonishingly complex spoken recitatives that weave philosophy, religious tradition, and ethics together into a mesmerizing verbal fugue.
~ "Variety", Jay Weissberg ~

* * *
Generations collide in a coming of age story set in Turkey from Cannes Palme d’Or laureate Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Returning to the Cannes stage four years after winning the Palme d’Or for his scenes from a marriage Winter Sleep, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan looks at his country through the prism of a grim coming-of-ager stripped of lyricism and joy. Slow and surprisingly talky, the three hours of the film do not exactly fly by, and the experience is similar to plunging into a long novel (the hero is a budding novelist) laced with philosophy, religion, politics and moral puzzles. The final sequences are worth the wait, though, bringing together the story’s many threads and offering the classic closure of a young man coming to terms with his identity. ~ "Hollywood reporter", Deborah Young ~

* * *
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who has already collected, among his many Cannes awards, one Palme d’Or (for Winter Sleep) and two Grand Prix (for Once Upon A Time In Anatolia and Distant), has never been known either for his brevity or accessibility. True to form, this time he puts even more demands on his audience in a sobering, beautifully shot, existential confrontation between a son and his father, which deals with much more than the generation gap. ~ "Screendaily", Dan Fainaru ~

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THE WILD PEAR TREE
Turkey-France-Germany-Bulgaria-Bosnia and Herzegovina-Macedonia-Sweden, 2018, 190’, HD, 4K

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan 
Script: Akın Aksu, Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cinematography: Gökhan Tiryaki
Cast: Doğu Demirkol, Murat Cemcir, Bennu Yıldırımlar, İrem Türkoğlu, Ali Erkazan, Özay Fecht, Hazar Ergüçlü
Producer: Zeynep Özbatur Atakan 
Co-producers: Alexandre Mallet-Guy, Fabian Gasmia, Stefan Kitanov, Mirsad Purivatra, Labina Mitevska, Katarina Krave, Harry Cherniak
Production: Zeyno Film, Memento Films Production, Detail Film, RFF International, Sisters and Brother Mitevski, 2006 Produkcija Sarajevo, Film i Vast, Chimney Pot
Funded by Eurimages, T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Sinema Genel Müdürlüğü, Arte France, Medienboard Berlin-Bradenburg, Bulgarian National Film Center, Macedonian Film Agency, Fondacija za Kinematogafiju Sarajevo, MPA APSA Academy Film Fund, in cooperation with Nu Boyana Film Studios.