Kasaba (The Small Town) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey, 1997, 82 min., 35 mm)

Synopsis:
Film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan recently came to international attention when his latest film Uzak won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. His first feature film, Kasaba, marks the emergence of Ceylan’s unique talent and offers a poetic contemplation of the division between city and village animating Turkish society. Told from the perspective of two children, Kasaba is a nuanced and reflective film following three generations of a family in a small town and a desire for cities as sites of the modern and new. Meditating on natural objects and human expressions, Ceylan’s stunning visual vocabulary provides a lens with which to examine Turkish culture and identity.
In Turkish with English subtitles.

Biography:
Nuri Bilge Ceylan was born in Istanbul in 1959. After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering from Bogaziçi University, he studied filmmaking for two years at Mimar Sinar University. His first short film, Cocoon (Koza, 1995), was screened at Cannes. He has also received many national and international awards for his debut feature, Kasaba (The Small Town), and for Clouds of May (Mayis Sikintisi), which was shown at Cinefan and the New Directors, New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Distant (Uzak), his third feature film, was the recipient of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2003.

Festivals & Awards:
Caligari Prize, Berlin Film Festival, 1998
Taipei Film Festival, 1998
Silver Prize, Tokyo International Film Festival, 1998
Special Jury Prize, Festival of Three Continents, Nantes, France, 1998
FIPRESCI Special Jury Prize, Istanbul Film Festival, 1998
Special Jury Prize, Festival Premiers Plans d'Angers, France, 1999
Best Film and Best Cinematography Prizes, Cologne Film Festival, 1999
Filmfest DC, Washington, D.C., 2000

Reveiws:
Produced with such outstanding intelligence and noble ideas the modesty of Kasaba has opened up a new vein of cinematic production.
-Ahmet Ulucay, Radikal Gazetesi

Kasaba stands opposite us, revealing misty scenes from a small town surrounded by snow-covered mountains and muddy roads. . . . It is about a natural life in the woods, children, a teacher, and an untidy school…The memories that are the last to be forgotten come in cloudy and misty images…death and life together. Nuri Bilge Ceylan achieves a complete aesthetic that is effective, dialectical, complex, natural and human.
-Tunca Arslan, Radikal Gazetesi

Kasaba is understood from the beginning as being a different kind of film. There are school and classroom images that conjure up feelings of nostalgia from bygone years that evoke replies of '…my existence is a present to Turkish existence,' and rantings that are repeated as a group at school and in every phase of life.
-Sungu Capan, Cumhuriyet Gazetesi

A strikingly original, vibrantly sensitive look at an extended family living in a remote Turkish village.... Shoestring shooting (the director did his own cinematography) in no way detracts from what the film wants to say and lends it great intimacy.
-Deborah Young, Variety