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Memento Intl., the well-established Paris-based international sales company behind “Call Me by Your Name,” is rebranding as Paradise City Sales and is bringing “My Notes on Mars,” starring Greta Lee and Andrew Scott, to the EFM.

Emilie Georges, who founded Memento Intl. 20 years ago, launched the production vehicle Paradise City a few years ago with London-based Naima Abed. The pair have had great success with the pics they delivered, notably 2025 Sundance hit ”Atropia,” starring Alia Shawkat and Channing Tatum, and Anthony Chen’s 2023 drama ”Drift,” with Cynthia Erivo. “My Notes of Mars,” Hungarian director Lili Horvát’s English-language debut feature, is the latest co-production on Paradise City’s slate.

The rebranding comes at a pivotal time as Georges and Abed seek to build a closer bond between production and sales. As such, the sales outlet will now operate under the same Paradise City banner, which has offices in Paris and London,...

They say that in life there are three guarantees: death, taxes, and that if there is a complicated woman in need of a stylishly done, painstakingly constructed biopic, then Pablo Larraín is the man to make it. Having sensitively explored the grief of Jackie Kennedy in the wake of JFK's death with 2017's Natalie Portman starrer Jackie, and then made a haunting portrait of Princess Diana's vulnerability with Kristen Stewart in 2021's Spencer, Larraín has enlisted the services of Angelina Jolie to help tell the story of fêted opera singer Maria Callas in the aptly titled Maria. Check out the first teaser for the film below:

"Maria, what do you want to sing?" asks a pianist as Jolie's Maria looks out on a grand, empty music hall. From there, we get shots of Callas – in black and white, on vintage film, in a plethora of gorgeous outfits...

Angelina Jolie is opera icon Maria Callas in the first trailer for “Maria,” Pablo Larraín’s latest biopic. Netflix has debuted the first trailer for the acclaimed film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and received an eight-minute standing ovation, launching Jolie and the feature into the awards race.

The actor plays the American-born Greek soprano Callas, who died from a heart attack at the age of 53. As suggested by the time-spanning trailer, “Maria” will cover the life story of the singer. Along with Jolie, the cast also includes Valeria Golino (“Rain Man”), Kodi Smit-McPhee (“The Power of the Dog”), Haluk Bilginer (“Winter Sleep), Alba Rohrwacher (“My Brilliant Friend”), Pierfrancesco Favino (“World War Z”), Jeremy Wheeler (“The Crown”) and Rebecka Johnston (“Midsommar”).

“Maria” is directed by Pablo Larraín (“El Conde”) and written by “Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight. The pair previously teamed up on “Spencer,” the Princess Diana feature...

Angelina Jolie says Maria, her latest movie where she plays the world’s greatest opera singer, is about an artist faced with creative struggles and doubt.

“Towards the end of her life of her life she had highs and the greatest highs, were where she could really feel she was connecting, and she had times where she felt she couldn’t, and it really broke her and she felt she wasn’t able to connect,” Jolie added when introducing a private screening at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday.

Pablo Larrain’s biopic Maria, based on true accounts, tells the tumultuous, beautiful and tragic story of the life of the world’s greatest opera singer, relived and reimagined during her final days in 1970s Paris.

Jolie, introducing the film, said Callas passed away during “darker times in her life.” So the film’s lead welcomed the Toronto audience and screening,...

After the detour of El Conde, Pablo Larraín returns with a study of opera singer Maria Callas, thus closing out a triptych of films on glamorous women, gilded isolation, and lingering death that began with Jackie in 2016 and continued via Spencer five years later. Maria stars Angelina Jolie, back with her meatiest performance in years as a prodigal artist whose gifts began to fade long before they should have. Working again from a script by Spencer‘s Steven Knight, the film imagines Callas’ final days in Paris leading up to her death in 1977, then just 53 years old. Using a fictional filmmaker (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to structure the story, Larraín skips back and forth: we see the singer’s early years (moving from New York to Athens on the eve of WWII), experience some iconic performances, and learn of her romantic regrets. This includes two separate occasions when Jackie Kennedy came into her orbit––though,...

A village teacher is accused of inappropriate behaviour in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s handsome, beautifully performed, three-and-a-half-hour fable

When we first glimpse schoolteacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), he’s little more than a sooty smudge in the wide, white snowscape of a bitter Anatolian winter. Spilled out of a minibus after a holiday, he registers displeasure with every heavy step through the blizzard as he returns to a place he describes repeatedly as a hellhole. Thick snowfall blurs the edges of his advancing figure, which takes an unexpectedly long time to take on a solid, three-dimensional form. Such unhurried pacing prevails for nearly three-and-a-half hours in this Turkish-language arthouse epic, the latest from festival heavyweight and 2014 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It’s an approach familiar from his previous pictures, such as Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, as a portrait of Samet is built by increments,...

Australia’s Sharmill Films has acquired distribution rights to Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig from Films Boutique. The feature scooped two awards at Cannes over the weekend.

The distributor will mount a theatrical release for the Iranian film in Australia and New Zealand. No release date has yet been scheduled but it will be submitted to key festivals in the territories ahead of a national release.

Sharmill picked up the rights before it received its world premiere in Cannes on Friday (May 24), after one of the first buyer screenings for the feature.

The Seed Of The Sacred Fig...

Iconic Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the maker of films like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep, and The Wild Pear Tree, once again proves his brilliance in encapsulating the complexities between man and society in his latest work, About Dry Grasses. The film’s plot is centered around Samet, a school teacher posted in a remote village in snowy Anatolia who desperately wants to leave the place. Ceylan masterfully presents an introspection into his far-from-perfect protagonist while also painting a picture of the regional culture and struggles through the other characters seen in the film.

Spoiler Alert

What is the film about?

About Dry Grasses begins amidst heavy snowfall at a small village in Eastern Anatolia during the harsh winter season when the entire area is covered under a thick white blanket of snow. A man is seen getting off a bus on the main road and...

Kino Lorber is expanding its streaming footprint. The boutique art-house distributor just launched its own SVOD platform, the Kino Film Collection.

The new app is available now as a standalone service on Apple TV, Fire TV, Android TV, and Roku, and it will feature hundreds of movies from Kino Lorber’s film library of more than 4,000 titles. Subscriptions will begin at $5.99 per month.

In November 2023, Kino Lorber launched an Amazon Prime Video channel; you can still access its titles there. But having its own service puts the company in the race alongside other niche streaming options in the space, like the Criterion Channel ($10.99/month) or Mubi ($14.99/month).

As part of the launch, Kino Film Collection curated a selection of titles that showcase auteurs who have played at Cannes; the 2024 film festival is currently ongoing. The collection includes early movies from Yorgos Lanthimos, Jia Zhangke, and Ken Loach, as well as...

New York arthouse distributor Kino Lorber is expanding its streaming service, Kino Film Collection, currently available on Amazon Prime, to include a stand-alone SVOD which will feature hundreds of titles from its extensive back catalog, including features from the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos, Jia Zhangke, and Ken Loach.

Kino Lorber announced the new service timed to start of this year’s Cannes film festival. The stand-alone SVOD, available to subscribers for $5.99 a month, includes several Cannes highlights from years past, including Kaouther Ben Hania’s Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters and Thien An Pham-directed drama Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, both winners of the Camera d’Or prize on the Croisette last year; Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, a 2019 competition title; and Palme d’Or winners Winter Sleep (2014) from Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Underground (1995) from Emir Kusturica.

“Cannes and the Kino Film Collection are so intertwined because we share a...

The stars are out on the Croisette for the 77th Cannes Film Festival, sporting their best looks on the red carpet. Already donning her resort wear best at the first Jury Call photo shoot was Hollywood icon Meryl Streep, who will receive the honorary Palme d’Or on the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival.

This year’s President, Greta Gerwig, will be joined by an illustrious jury that includes Lily Gladstone Eva Green Omar Sy Ebru Ceylan (who co-wrote the 2014 Palme d’Or winner “Winter Sleep”), “Capernaum” director Nadine Labaki, “Society of the Snow” director Juan Antonio Bayona, Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino and “Shoplifters” director Kore-eda Hirokazu.

The list of star-studded premieres includes George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” which stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth. Oscar-winner Yorgos Lanthimos will debut his next film, “Kinds of Kindness,” starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley on the Croisette.

The 2024 Cannes Film Festival competition jury, led by president Greta Gerwig, met the international press Tuesday — and it didn’t take long before the assembled stars were urged to address the various fraught political issues swirling around this year’s edition of the world’s most glamorous film fest.

On the eve of the 77th festival, Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux had set the tone by attempting to distance the event from hot-button topics, saying at his own press conference on Monday, “We are trying to have a festival without these polemics. In Cannes, the politics should be on the screen.”

The French festival head, who has served in his role since 2001, noted how coverage of Cannes has changed over his tenure, as the international media’s interest has shifted from the films on exhibition to an expectation that the festival be responsive to surrounding social issues. That was certainly the case Tuesday,...

From top left: Omar Sy; Lily Gladstone; Juan Antonia Bayona; Nadine Labaki; Greta Gerwig; Ebru Celan; Hirokazu Kore-ada; Eva Green; and Pierfrancesco Favino (Pablo Arroyo). Photo: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival; Selly Sy, Lindsay Siu, Germán Romani, Jihad Hojelli, Ben Rayner, Nuri Bige Celan, Mikiya Takimoto, Xavier Torres-Bacchetta, Pablo Arroyo As pre-Cannes anticipation goes in to overdrive, the organisers have announced the full Competition jury under the already announced presidency of Greta Gerwig whose Barbie made her the first director in the history of cinema to top the billion-dollar mark at the box office.

Besides other prizes the jury’s most onerous task is to bestow the Palme d’Or which last year went to Justine Triet’s Anatomy Of A Fall.

Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone who was in Cannes last year for Killers Of The Flower Moon steps on to the jury roster alongside French actress Eva Green (from...

The full Cannes Film Festival competition jury has been revealed.

Joining president Greta Gerwig to award this year’s Palme d’Or will be “Killers of the Flower Moon” Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone; “The Three Musketeers” star Eva Green; “Lupin” lead Omar Sy; Ebru Ceylan, who co-wrote the 2014 Palme d’Or winner “Winter Sleep”; director Nadine Labaki, whose “Capernaum” won the Cannes jury prize in 2018; director Juan Antonio Bayona, whose latest film “Society of the Snow” was Oscar-nominated for best international feature; Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino, who will next appear in Pablo Larraìn’s “Maria” alongside Angelina Jolie; and director Kore-eda Hirokazu, director of the 2018 Palme d’Or winner “Shoplifters.”

The competition lineup for the upcoming festival includes “All We Imagine as Light” by Payal Kapadia; Sean Baker’s “Anora”; Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice” from Ali Abbasi; Andrea Arnold’s “Bird,” starring Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski; “Caught by the Tides...

The Cannes Film Festival has picked its full jury.

Oscar-nominated The Killers of the Flower Moon lead Lily Gladstone, French stars Eva Green and Omar Sy, and Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino are among the A-listers who will join Barbie director Greta Gerwig, this year’s jury president for the 77th Cannes Film Festival, in selecting the winners, including the best film Palme d’Or, from the 2024 competition lineup.

A trio of international Oscar-nominated directors: Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki (Capernaum), Spain’s Juan Antonio Bayona (Society of the Snow) and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters), as well as Turkish screenwriter and photographer Ebru Ceylan, co-writer of 2014 Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep (with director husband Nuri Bilge Ceylan), complete the five-woman, four-man jury.

Among the films in the running for this year’s Palme d’Or are Francis Ford Coppola’s long-anticipated Megalopolis, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things follow-up Kinds of Kindness,...

The Cannes Film Festival has named the eight members of its main Competition jury who will join previously announced president Greta Gerwig in deciding the Palme d’Or and other key prizes at 77th edition running from May 14 to 25.

They are Turkish screenwriter and photographer Ebru Ceylan, U.S. actress Lily Gladstone, French actress Eva Green, Lebanese director and screenwriter Nadine Labaki, Spanish director and screenwriter J.A. Bayona, Italian actor Pierfrancisco Favino, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda and French actor and producer Omar Sy.

The wife and long-time collaborator of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, screenwriter and photographer Ceylan co-wrote 2014 Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep and also took co-writing credits on Cannes selected films Three Monkeys (Best Director Prize 2008), Once upon a time in Anatolia (Grand Prix 2011), The Wild Pear Tree (2018) and About Dry Grasses (2023).

Ceylan also appeared as an actress and took art director credits on her husband’s early films...

The Cannes Film Festival has unveiled the eight jurors who will be joining jury president Greta Gerwig for the event’s 2024 edition (May 14-25).

They are American actress Lily Gladstone, French actress Eva Green, French actor and producer Omar Sy, Lebanese director and screenwriter Nadine Labaki, Spanish director and screenwriter Juan Antonio Bayona, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, Turkish screenwriter and photographer Ebru Ceylan, and Italian actor Pierfrancisco Favino.

The jury will award the Palme d’Or to one of the 22 films in competition at the closing ceremony on May 25. Anatomy Of A Fall picked up the top prize last year.

Returning to Cannes with his first film in five years, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses earned a Best Actress prize for Merve Dizdar. 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. Will his encounter with Nuray, herself a teacher, help him overcome his angst?” After this month’s Oscar-qualifying run, Janus-Sideshow will begin unrolling About Dry Grasses on February 23, 2024, ahead of which there’s a U.S. trailer.

Rory O’Connor was impressed with the film at Cannes, writing, “It’s a hallmark of Ceylan’s artistry that those exchanges are as strongly staged as they are dramatic. Here as in another of the director’s Anatolia-set dramas,...

Turkey’s Best International Feature Oscar entry “About Dry Grasses” defrosts the blurred lines between teacher and student, colleague and mentor, in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s epically ambitioned, Cannes award-winning drama.

IndieWire debuts the trailer for the film that follows an abusive teacher (Deniz Celiloğlu) as he grapples with living in icy Anatolia, including favoring one pupil (Ece Bağcı), and seeking solace with a fellow teacher.

Samet (Celiloğlu) is a young art teacher now in his fourth year of compulsory service in a remote village in Anatolia. After a turn of events he can hardly make sense of, as is the case of many a Ceylan character facing a void, he loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in. Will his encounter with Nuray, also a teacher, help him overcome his angst? Musab Ekici also stars as Samet’s roommate.

The film is directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan,...

Pablo Larraín (Jackie) has revealed two first photos of Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in his new film that will explore the life of the legendary singer, often described as the original diva.

Based on true accounts, Maria will tell the tumultuous, beautiful and tragic story of the life of the world’s greatest female opera singer, relived and reimagined during her final days in 1970s Paris. Shoot is underway and taking place over eight weeks in Paris, Greece, Budapest and Milan.

Also starring in the movie, which has a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement, will be Pierfrancesco Favino (The Hummingbird), Alba Rohrwacher (La Chimera), Haluk Bilginer (Winter Sleep), Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog) and Valeria Golino (Portrait of a Lady on Fire).

The script, which was completed prior to the WGA strike, comes from Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders). Producers are Juan de Dios Larraín for Fabula, Jonas Dornbach...

The first two images of Angelina Jolie as famed diva Maria Callas in Pablo Larrain’s upcoming biopic Maria have been revealed.

Based on true accounts, the film will tell the tumultuous, beautiful and tragic story of the life of the world’s greatest opera singers, relived and re-imagined during her final days in 1970s Paris. With the independent production having signed to a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement, the shoot is now set to start, and will take place over eight weeks in Paris, Greece, Budapest and Milan.

Alongside Jolie, the cast also includes Pierfrancesco Favino (Adagio, The Hummingbird), Alba Rohrwacher (La Chimera, Hungry Hearts), Haluk Bilginer (Winter Sleep), Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog, Elvis) and Valeria Golino (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Caos Calmo).

The script, which was completed prior to the WGA strike, is written by Steven Knight (Spencer, Peaky Blinders, Eastern Promises). Producers...

Cameras are set to roll in mid-October in Budapest on Pablo Larraín’s Maria Callas biopic “Maria” toplining Angelina Jolie in the title role with several new cast members now on board.

Italian star Valeria Golino, whose recent appearances include a lead in Netflix’s Elena Ferrante series “The Lying Life of Adults” and season 2 of Apple Original “The Morning Show,” is set to play the legendary opera singer’s older sister Yakinthi – known as Jackie – while revered Turkish screen and stage veteran Haluk Bilginer (“Winter Sleep”) has landed the role as Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

Fremantle, which is among companies producing “Maria,” also confirmed on Thursday that the film’s additional cast comprises Italian A-listers Alba Rohrwacher and Pierfrancesco Favino and Oscar-nominated Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee (“The Power of the Dog”), all in unspecified roles.

“Maria” “tells the tumultuous, beautiful, and tragic story of the life of the world’s greatest opera singer,...

Nuri Bilge Ceylan likes to take his time. The Turkish director is one of the greatest living practitioners of slow cinema. The filmmaking ethos — pioneered by Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky and taken up by the likes of Theo Angelopoulos, Albert Serra, Béla Tarr, Kelly Reichardt and Lav Diaz — eschews the rapid editing and relentless nonstop forward-driving plots of the Hollywood blockbuster (looking at you, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) for a more contemplative, metaphysical approach.

The characters in a Ceylan movie don’t do much. There’s little action or traditional suspense, and the storylines are fairly basic. In 2002’s Distant, a rural factory worker visits his cousin in Istanbul. Homicide police unearth the body of a murder victim and take a long drive back to the city for the autopsy in 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. An old actor, his wife and his sister sit...

The pastures in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s luminous new film are only dry at the very end. Save for that brief summery coda, the landscape in About Dry Grasses remains a snowcapped immensity where prairies are ringed by belittling peaks, people stand out as calligraphic silhouettes, and snow falls so heavy as to blot out everything. It’s as if it fell “to make oblivion possible,” observes art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), and in a film populated with wanderers trying to start anew, those words echo like a prayer. Geographically and thematically close to the rest of Ceylan’s oeuvre, the film finds him working once again in a remote corner of Eastern Anatolia and revisiting leitmotifs in his preferred mode: long, talky symposiums that pit characters against each other in games of verbal fencing. But none of it feels like a retreading. If anything, About Dry Grasses is both...

The film is Picturehouse Entertainment’s second acquisition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Picturehouse Entertainment has acquired UK and Ireland rights to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes Competition title About Dry Grasses from France’s Playtime.

Ceylan’s seventh Competition film follows a teacher doing a mandatory stint at a small village in Eastern Anatolia. He loses hope of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in, but an encounter with another teacher could help him overcome his angst.

Co-­producers include France’s Arte France Cinéma and Sweden’s Film i Väst — both served as co-­producers...

by Cláudio Alves

The competition continues to heat up at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, with various contenders staking their claim on the Palme. It may be time for Nuri Bilge Ceylan to win his second. About Dry Grass is his seventh competition feature, including 2014's grand champion Winter Sleep. Then again, the critics have reached a consensus so far, with the favorite film being Jonathan Glazer's return to feature filmmaking after a decade-long pause, The Zone of Interest. Kaouther Ben Hania's follow-up to the Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin is less acclaimed but might yet prove an awards contender. Four Daughters is one of two documentaries in competition.

For this 'Cannes at Home' adventure, let's look at some of these directors' past successes, their best films according to yours. There's Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Glazer's Under the Skin, and Ben Hania's Beauty and the Dogs…...

Cannes official competition has grandfathered-in filmmakers—Pedro Almodóvar, the Dardennes, Arnaud Desplechin—who will keep being included no matter what, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose every feature since 2002’s Distant has premiered here, is definitely among them. After receiving the Grand Prix for 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan introduced his “three-plus-hours only” mode with 2014’s Winter Sleep and 2018’s The Wild Pear Tree, and reception was what you might call “respectfully muted.” Outside the festival, his reputation seems to have fallen off: it’s a long way from the 2007 Coen brothers short World Cinema, in which a cowboy played by Josh Brolin goes to see […]

The post Cannes 2023: About Dry Grasses, The Sweet East first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Cannes official competition has grandfathered-in filmmakers—Pedro Almodóvar, the Dardennes, Arnaud Desplechin—who will keep being included no matter what, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose every feature since 2002’s Distant has premiered here, is definitely among them. After receiving the Grand Prix for 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan introduced his “three-plus-hours only” mode with 2014’s Winter Sleep and 2018’s The Wild Pear Tree, and reception was what you might call “respectfully muted.” Outside the festival, his reputation seems to have fallen off: it’s a long way from the 2007 Coen brothers short World Cinema, in which a cowboy played by Josh Brolin goes to see […]

The post Cannes 2023: About Dry Grasses, The Sweet East first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A lengthy shoot, a lengthy post-production process and a lengthy runtime mean it’s business as usual for our favorite Turkish auteur. A mainstay on the Croisette, Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been very fortunate in the South of France landing several prizes over the years. After his first pair of films premiered at the Berlinale, he has been here with Uzak (Distant) which was awarded the Grand Prix and Best Actor prize in 2003, 2006’s Climates, 2008’s Three Monkeys, Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (2011), Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep and finally The Wild Pear Tree in 2018.…...

At nearly 200 minutes in length, “About Dry Grasses” (or “Kuru Otlar Üstüne”) is par for the course for Turkish virtuoso Nuri Bilge Ceylan. He returns, once again, to the icy frost of his Anatolia-set Palme d’Or winner “Winter Sleep,” for a story that beats with similar frustrations towards power in the grand social scheme. However, he weaves this theme into his background tapestry, favoring instead a talkative and often discomforting tale of a small-town art teacher, his 12-year-old female student, and an accusation of impropriety that might be false on its surface, but is rooted in truths the camera sees.

Where “Winter Sleep” adapted Russian greats like Chekhov and Dostoyevsky — it draws from both “The Wife” and “The Brothers Karamazov”— “About Dry Grasses” plays like a spiritual descendant of Nabokov’s “Lolita,” at least in its use of point-of-view. Ceylan’s novelistic approach to cinema could perhaps find no...

When is time not on the side of any Cannes film premiere?

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, which had its world premiere Friday night, follows the middle-class melancholy of a Turkish rural village art teacher, clocks in at 3 hours and 17 minutes. So far, the movie is one of few weighing in at the 3-hour-plus stretch; the other, premiering Saturday, being Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon at 3 hours and 26 minutes.

However, Ceylan said today at the his film’s Cannes press conference that he could have made his snow-laden epic so much longer.

“The film could have continued on for a very long time,” Ceylan told the press.

About Dry Glasses follows Samet, whose school is an area where there’s essentially two seasons: snow and yellow grass. In his humdrum existence, he becomes fascinated by a young female student, Sevim, who he tries to mentor...

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ’About Dry Grasses’ and ’The Zone Of Interest’ both scored 2.8.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest both land on Screen’s 2023 Cannes jury grid with 2.8, joining Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring) in first place.

About Dry Grasses scored the highest mark of four (excellent) from The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, Postif’s Michel Ciment and filfan.com’s Ahmed Shawky. It also received six threes (good) and two twos (average), with Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre giving the film one.

Click on the jury grid above for the most up-to-date version.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan loves snow. The depths of winter, people in thick coats, frozen taps, the sense that these long, bitterly cold seasons in mountain regions will never end. This is all working material for the Turkish master whose Winter Sleep won the Palme d’Or in 2014. “What am I doing here?” is the regular moan from Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), the art teacher in the village school in About Dry Grasses.

Meaning: what is a man of the world doing teaching potato farmers’ children how to draw a horse? Why is he in this desolate country with two seasons that turn over so quickly that once the snow melts, the buried yellow grass almost immediately is turned brown by the fierce summer sun? Even the grass has no chance in life: It’s unbearable. It’s like him, he muses in a rare voice-over, condemned by circumstance to insignificance.

Ceylan...

To this Turkish critic, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is our Mike Leigh and Anton Chekhov in one, with multilayered characters of social and political complexities engaging through dialogue lines that feel both off-the-cuff and studiously planned in their lavish rhythms. Ceylan is also a master of luxuriously slow cinema with a recognizable visual style, haunting, minimalistic and sneakily riveting across textured, widescreen pastoral scenes and dimly-lit interiors that evolve with peerless patience.

Written by Ceylan, Akin Aksu and Ebru Ceylan, his latest stunner “About Dry Grasses”—Ceylan’s best feature since “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”—flutters with all these pictorial qualities and emotional dispositions. It’s a searing, mesmerizing and unforgettably wintry mood piece and character study that is in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, nearly a decade after his “Winter Sleep” won the Palme d’Or.

It’s also a deeply Turkish film that gently...

Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan continues to explore his homeland’s teeming dichotomies — city/rural, secularism/faith, individualism/tradition and so forth — in About Dry Grasses, his latest Cannes competition entrant, which revolves around schoolteachers in a remote rural community. Running true to recent form (see 2014 Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep and 2018’s Cannes-entrant The Wild Pear Tree), despite the setting in contemporary Anatolia, this latest work nevertheless plays like an adaptation of some lost, weighty 19th-century Russian novel of ideas beloved by mid-20th existentialists and largely forgotten until Ceylan repurposed it.

Of course, that’s not the actual case, and the script was written by Ceylan himself, his wife and frequent collaborator Erbu Ceylan and Akin Aksu. All the same, the screenplay is distinctly opaque, despite the huge chunks of philosophical dialogue and debate it delivers. The film is edited in a seemingly deliberately raggedy style, with...

“Does everyone have to be a hero?” The question comes from thirtysomething art teacher Samet (Deni̇z Celi̇loğlu), burst out in frustration in the heat of an intense argument with his fellow educator and would-be girlfriend Nuray (Merve Di̇zdar), as they disagree over just how, or how much, any individual is obliged to contribute to society. It’s a familiar cry from a male protagonist in a film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, even if it hasn’t ever been worded quite so directly: “About Dry Grasses,” his long, languid but slowly captivating ninth feature, is merely his latest work to examine man’s right, for better or worse, to be selfish, to be an anti-hero, to crave attention and isolation all at once, and to talk about it all night long.

That talky impulse in particular has become a signature of Ceylan’s filmmaking, to occasionally enervating effect.

The red carpets are being rolled out, the rosé is being chilled, and the biggest names in international cinema are getting ready to converge on France for this year’s Cannes Film Festival. After a stellar return to form with last year’s event, which followed a delayed and truncated 2021 festival and a totally cancelled 2020 edition, the circuit’s starriest annual event seems ready to deliver another enviable selection of some of the year’s best films.

This year’s festival includes new films from some of cinema’s biggest names, including Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Ken Loach, and even Jean-Luc Godard. There are big studio efforts on offer and new features from some of our favorite auteurs.

There’s also already plenty of controversy afoot, from the programming of Maïwenn’s Johnny Depp-starring “Jeanne du Barry” as the fest’s opener to the inclusion of The Weeknd...

Paris-based Playtime has unveiled a strong Cannes film market sales slate, which includes competition titles “About Dry Grasses” and “Homecoming.”

“About Dry Grasses” is by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who won the Palme d’Or in 2014 for “Winter Sleep.” The film follows Samet, a young art teacher, 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, and hopes that his encounter with fellow teacher Nuray will help him overcome his angst. Deniz Celiloğlu, Merve Dizdar and Musab Ekici are among the cast.

“Homecoming,” by French director Catherine Corsini who won the 2021 Queer Palm for “The Divide,” follows Khédidja, who minds a wealthy Parisian family’s children for a summer in Corsica. She brings along her own two...

The lineup for the 2023 Cannes Film Festival will include a couple of world premieres for two of the anticipated upcoming films of the year as well as some notable entries for the competition. The new president of the Cannes Film Festival, Iris Knobloch unveiled the list of films set to make screenings and remarked, “Cannes is going back to the future of cinema.” The roster of filmmakers featured this year features a bevy of renowned names from all over the film world. The Hollywood Reporter gives us a breakdown of the highlights of titles that are scheduled to make their appearance.

Two big Hollywood world premieres include the upcoming sequel to Indiana Jones and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. The much-anticipated film reunites Scorsese with not only his frequent collaborator, Leonard DiCaprio, but with his legendary collaborator, Robert De Niro. The plot synopsis for Killers reads, “In 1920s Oklahoma,...

Grab your baguettes, everybody, it’s time to head back to the Cannes Film Festival.

Iris Knobloch, the new president of the festival, presented the bulk of this year’s slate, with artistic director Thierry Frémaux at her side. The main competition sees a number of returning veterans, as well as some new faces.

There are not too many movies in the main competition this year coming from directors that also work in the Hollywood orbit. The ones that do include: “Asteroid City” from Wes Anderson, which stars Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, and countless other stars; “May December” from Todd Haynes, which stars Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman (a movie about an unlikely couple also produced by one: Christine Vachon and Will Ferrell); and a new one from Jonathan Glazer called “The Zone of Interest,” a film set at Auschwitz based on a novel by Martin Amis. Austrian...

New films from Wes Anderson, Jessica Hausner, Nanni Moretti, Catherine Breillat, Todd Haynes, Ken Loach and Wim Wenders have all been selected for the 2023 Cannes competition.

The Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27) has unveiled its 2023 official selection already buzzing with the return of veteran auteurs In Competition including Todd Haynes, Jessica Hausner, Wim Wenders, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Catherine Breillat, Wes Anderson, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Hirokazu Kore-eda.

They join the previously announced Martin Scorsese, whose Killers Of The Flower Moon was announced for Out of Competition but who still could end up in Competition, it was suggested at today’s press conference.

“Cannes is going back to the future of cinema,” said Iris Knobloch, the new president of the Cannes Film Festival, unveiling the lineup for the 2023 event on Thursday. And looking at this year’s selection, it’s hard to argue with her.

The 76th Cannes International Film Festival looks like an all-killer, no-filler program, with some of the biggest names in international cinema, many of whom got their start on the Croisette, returning to that famed red carpet. The 2023 competition lineup includes new films from Wes Anderson, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ken Loach, Todd Haynes, Nanni Moretti and Aki Kaurismäki. In addition, Cannes has packed its out-of-competition screenings with blockbusters, including Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, as well as a new documentary from Oscar winner Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave).

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, one of the director’s typically-quirky and star-studded affairs,...

In May, the Cannes Film Festival injects a jolt of international cinema into year ahead, and expectations are even greater than usual this time around. In 2022, Cannes was the starting point for everything from future commercial hits “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Elvis” to arthouse successes like “Decision to Leave” and “Eo.” With less pandemic-era stagnation on productions, there are more newly finished (or almost finished) Cannes hopefuls in the mix than anytime in recent memory.

Some of the bigger ones have been widely reported: We already know that Martin Scorsese’s sprawling Osage Nation crime drama “Killers of the Flower Moon” will bring the revered director back to the festival with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in tow, while “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is poised to premiere in an out-of-competition slot 15 years after the last entry did the same thing. There’s also a lot of...

Nearly a decade after its debut in competition at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered alongside the likes of Goodbye to Language, Winter Sleep, Clouds of Sils Maria, Maps to the Stars, and Two Days, One Night, Naomi Kawase’s drama Still the Water is getting a North American home courtesy of Film Movement. Ahead of a March 3 digital release, we’re exclusively debuting the new trailer for the film starring Nijirô Murakami, Junko Abe, Miyuki Matsuda, Tetta Sugimoto, and Makiko Watanabe.

On the subtropical Japanese island of Amami, traditions about nature remain eternal. Following a typhoon and during the full-moon night of traditional dances in August, 16-year-old Kaito (Nijirô Murakami) discovers a dead body floating in the sea. His girlfriend, Kyoko (Junko Abe), will attempt to help him understand this mysterious discovery. Together, Kaito and Kyoko will learn to become adults by experiencing the interwoven cycles of life,...

Zeynep Atakan, the producer of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Palme d’Or winner “Winter Sleep,” has come on board to co-produce and handle international sales for “Hilal, Feza and Other Planets,” director Kutluğ Ataman’s follow-up to his 2014 Berlin Film Festival player, “The Lamb.”

The film begins soon after Turkey’s September 1997 coup, when Hilal and Fatma leave their Muslim town near the Turkish capital, Ankara, to study at the state university in Istanbul. A new law bars Fatma from entering the campus if she wears her religious head scarf. Meanwhile, their downstairs neighbor, Feza, has fled her own village where she was cruelly bullied for being a transgender woman. Hilal chooses to help Feza and Fatma, and against all odds, they’re brought together in the struggle for their rights.

“Hilal, Feza and Other Planets,” which Ataman shot on his smart phone, took part in Cannes’ Cinefondation Atelier in 2015. Currently in post-production,...

It’s a tough game of survival in Calcutta, a city which keeps its people in their same old spaces with the same-same job opportunities, with little to no chance to change their lives for the better. For those few brave who try to challenge the rules of the societal game in Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s drama “Once Upon a Time in Calcutta”, things don’t go all too well. Ela (Sreelekha Mitra) gets punished for being born out of a wedlock as a daughter of a wealthy, married man and the city’s once-upon-a-time big performance star. She can’t be included to the inheritance, and her half-brother Bubu (Bratya Basu) is still sulking about his father’s infidelity four decades later, blocking her chances of getting the fair share out of the sale of the family house where he still lives alone, locked behind the barred door. Raja...

It’s a tough game of survival in Calcutta, a city which keeps its people in their same old spaces with the same-same job opportunities, with little to no chance to change their lives for the better. For those few brave who try to challenge the rules of the societal game in Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s drama “Once Upon a Time in Calcutta”, things don’t go all too well. Ela (Sreelekha Mitra) gets punished for being born out of a wedlock as a daughter of a wealthy, married man and the city’s once-upon-a-time big performance star. She can’t be included to the inheritance, and her half-brother Bubu (Bratya Basu) is still sulking about his father’s infidelity four decades later, blocking her chances of getting the fair share out of the sale of the family house where he still lives alone, locked behind the barred door. Raja...

Although the pandemic has pole-axed many independent distributors, some like Alexandre Mallet-Guy at Paris-based Memento Distribution have managed to weather the storm.

The company has had prestige auteur films playing in the festival circuit this year; at Cannes with multiple films in competition, including Jacques Audiard’s “Paris, District 13th,” Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s “A Hero” and Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World;” in Deauville with Christophe Honoré’s “Guermantes;” and at San Sebastian with Laurent Cantet’s “Arthur Rambo,” Zhang Ji’s “Fire on the Plain” and Emmanuel Carriere’s “Between Two Worlds” with Juliette Binoche which world premiered on opening night at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight.

Along with his distribution activities, Mallet-Guy is also involved in production through Memento Production. The banner produces or co-produces select director-driven projects. “A Hero,” for instance, was produced by Mallet-Guy and Farhadi’s companies.

The movie...

It’s a tough game of survival in Calcutta, a city which keeps its people in their same old spaces with the same-same job opportunities, with little to no chance to change their lives for the better. For those few brave who try to challenge the rules of the societal game in Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s drama “Once Upon a Time in Calcutta”, things don’t go all too well. Ela (Sreelekha Mitra) gets punished for being born out of a wedlock as a daughter of a wealthy, married man and the city’s once-upon-a-time big performance star. She can’t be included to the inheritance, and her half-brother Bubu (Bratya Basu) is still sulking about his father’s infidelity four decades later, blocking her chances of getting the fair share out of the sale of the family house where he still lives alone, locked behind the barred door. Raja...

Now that we’re entering Year 2 of our pandemic purgatory, here’s at least one positive takeaway: We’re coming to terms with our past — our movie past, that is. Two films circa 1951 and 1966 represent a personal case in point. Miracle In Milan (1951) starts with a lost baby and an operatic cop, but it’s touching and absurdist. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) delivers an empathetic protagonist with a Trumpian addiction to violence that seems relevant.

The fact that films like these are being re-visited and debated tells us something about our post-viral culture: A vacancy sign hangs over what passes for the movie scene. But viewing classic movies demands qualities I am deficient in –- patience, for example.

Pre-streamer filmmakers were leisurely in their pacing, which by today’s standards seems gratifying, yet soporific. “Leave lots of string between the pearls,” Billy Wilder used to advise his acolytes, which translates into...