Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a Turkish director born in 1959 in Istanbul. He graduated from the Engineering Department of Bosphorus University and then studied filmmaking at Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul. His short film Cocoon was followed by three feature-length works that constituted his “provincial trilogy” – Small Town, Clouds of May and Distant. Small Town was screened at festivals around the world and won numerous awards. Distant won many national and international awards, including the Grand Jury Prize and the Best Actor Award at the Cannes IFF. In 2006 he made Climates, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes IFF 2006. Ceylan’s Three Monkeys took the Best Director Award at Cannes IFF 2008.
During the 16th Sofia International Film Festival, Nuri Bilge Ceylan presented his new film, Once Upon A Time in Anatolia. You can read the interview he gave for the festival’s Daily in the link. For Nuri Bilge Ceylan the human face is the most beautiful scenery in the world, he confessed during the ten minutes of the interview. And about the trip in the Iskar gorge, about his son, about the long periods of shooting of his films and his favorite films.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan was awarded the Sofia Municipality award for outstanding achievements in world cinema in 2012.