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Let the Hypnotic, Caustic Beauty of About Dry Grasses Consume You
Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes award winner is one of the best films of this or any other year.
The Turkish director, who has over the past two decades become one of international cinema’s brand-name auteurs(and whose films have won just about every single juried award at Cannes), is known for his deliberate pacing, his weighty subjects, and his melancholy characters. There’s a similar sequence in About Dry Grasses, a winding conversation between the film’s nominal protagonist, a thirty-something schoolteacher named Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), and fellow educator Nuray (Merve Dizdar, who won a deserved Best Actress award at last year’s Cannes) about the importance of political action. About Dry Grasses riffs on a common trope in Turkish film and literature of teachers who travel to remote, rural corners of the country to educate and ennoble the people who live in these impoverished communities.
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