Snow: a distinctive element in most of Ceylan’s films. Back in the days I wrote something about this on my blog, now I just want to point it out because… Yes - and judging by this teaser trailer - it’s snowing heavy, it’s snowing a lot in Kuru Otlar Üstüne/About Dry Grasses, his first film in five years, freshly premiered at Cannes.
According to the synopsis, the film follows the young art teacher Samet „who is finishing his fourth year of compulsory service in a remote village in Anatolia. After a turn of events he can hardly make sense of, he loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in?”
At the Cannes Film Festival press conference, Ceylan said that what has driven him to form a narrative through the experiences of an art teacher in the midst of his compulsory service in Turkey’s Eastern Anatolian region „was mainly the idea that such a subject could present a rich motley of situations and events that could provide room for discussions on basic concepts that (in Turkey) continuously confront us as the principal dichotomies, like good versus evil, and individualism versus collectivism”.
Of course he’s in the know, I cannot elaborate on that before watching the film.
However, following the Cannes premiere, we have also a poster to look at it, this one above. From where I stand and seeing the way he stands, it reminds me of…, well, a famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich.