Nuri Bilge Ceylan was born in 1959 in Istanbul. During his engineering studies at university, he devoted much of his time to his passion for photography and cinema. It was only after completing his degree that he was able to start studying film, but he was forced to interrupt his studies, which didn't stop him from making a short film, Cocoon, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. He went on to make a trilogy of feature films, and with Distant, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, he achieved international recognition. Years later, his masterpiece Winter Sleep was awarded the Palme d'Or, consecrating him as one of the most important and acclaimed directors of our times.
Although short, his filmography is impressive, beautiful and emotional, extremely delicate, with an intimate and profound atmosphere and a connection to the transformations taking place in his country, Turkey. With great attention to detail, this is a cinema of landscapes, natural and interior, of "ordinary" characters, their relationships and their conflicts, sentimental and affective, where Ceylan himself is often an actor and chooses friends and family for the cast.
In its 17th edition, LEFFEST is honouring the filmmaker with a full retrospective of his work from The Small Town (1997) and Clouds of May (1999), not released theatrically in Portugal, continuing with Distant (2003), winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and Best Actor Award, Climates (2006), which won the FIPRESCI Prize, followed by Three Monkeys (2008), awarded the Best Director Prize at Cannes, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), also awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, Winter Sleep (2014), winner of the Palme d'Or, The Wild Pear Tree (2018), and the most recent About Dry Grasses (2023), which won the Best Actress Prize at Cannes and is part of the Official Selection of LEFFEST'23.