About Dry Grasses
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (on Mubi)
About Dry Grasses is the ninth feature film by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan. He not only directed it but also co-wrote it with his wife Ebru Ceylan and Akin Aksu. The lead female in this film, Merve Dizdar, won the best actress gong in Cannes 2023 for her role, and the film won Best International Co-production at the Lumiere Awards in 2024. Ceylan previously won the Palme D’or for his film Winter Sleep in 2014.
The title makes it clear that this is no fast-moving Hollywood action movie but a reflective, meandering art movie, like Ceylan’s other recent work, and, as with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Winter Sleep, set in the mountainous terrain of what used to be Asia Minor, but is now part of Turkey. In this region, thick snow covers the ground for many months of the year, and, as the protagonist tells us, seems to be followed immediately by summer rather than spring, so that the wild grasses on the hilly slopes turn yellow and dry almost immediately.
Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) is a disaffected art teacher at a village school. His posting is mandatory and he has worked in this rural area for four years, and is desperate to get back to Istanbul at the end of the year.
He prides himself on being a thoroughly modern teacher, affable and laid back, but he clearly has a favourite, the pubescent Sevim, played by Ece Bagci. He brings her occasional little gifts and she hugs him in the school corridor. But when a fellow classmate asks why he always chooses Sevim and her friends to answer in class, Samet erupts: he is not a man who can face up to his flaws, he is a denier. Contemplative and self questioning he is not.