A strong, poetic feature debut from a master-in-the-making, centering on two young children’s perspective of living in their home village, as the adults around them converse about the cruelty and misery of life.
This giddying Golden Berlin Bear winner by German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin is uncompromising in its treatment of drug use, violence and sex—yet the potential for love, staged or otherwise, to redeem the most despairing of human beings seems ripe for the picking.
Continue reading →Its extraordinary locational cinematography occasionally threatens to overwhelm the narrative, but its elliptical approach reveals more depth than it appears to have.
Continue reading →An aspiring writer discovers that his father’s debt issues could be insurmountable in another brilliant elemental epic by Ceylan that earns its length, exploring themes of identity, self-image, and personal dreams.
Continue reading →Ceylan continues to explore the beauty and peril of human communication with aplomb in this long but ultimately fruitful cinematic sermon, as a hotel owner in a remote Turkish village deals with conflicts within his spheres of influence.
Continue reading →Ceylan and his wife star as a couple facing the complexities of spousal communication and the fragility of marriage in this slow-burning, Antonioni-esque drama that is marked by few words.
Continue reading →A hit-and-run accident sets in motion what may be Ceylan’s bleakest film, a departure into a slightly more experimental style marked by grimy cinematography and even more measured pacing, as it explores a family on the precipice of disintegration.
Continue reading →This deliberately paced anti-investigative procedural, directed by Ceylan in astonishing form, is my favourite film of the 2010s decade, as a methodical ‘character’ study about personas, geographical psychology, stasis and incommunicability plays out with profound philosophical effect.
Continue reading →Powerful and thought-provoking, this is one of Fatih Akin’s finest works.
Eternality Tan 