A biting wind tore through the still air, as snowfall painted everything a desolate white. Outside, white fabrics thrashed in the icy breeze, and even the trees appeared to be frozen in winter's profound quiet.

Frost etched delicate patterns across the windowpanes. Inside, a boy named Nuri watched, captivated not by the cold, but by the unusual stillness that settled over everything.

What seemed like a simple childhood memory was, in fact, the unfolding of a cinematic vision.

With each change of season, Nuri found himself lying on the warm grass, solitary yet content, watching ants navigate their tiny world beneath him. It's a scene that could easily belong in one of his films, and it very well might have.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, born on a piercing January morning in 1959, would become one of the most quietly radical filmmakers of the 21st century. But first, he watched. And waited.

From an early age, he was driven by a search for something deeper—more than just narratives, he sought an underlying truth, an essence hidden in nature and in the unspoken moments of people's lives.

This deep hunger for meaning found its expression in photography during his university years, leading him to join the campus photography club. His camera quickly became an inseparable companion, framing not just pictures, but life's very essence.

Cinema, though, was the true calling.

Film courses and screenings became his unofficial curriculum, far more instructive than any textbook. He drifted across cities–London, Kathmandu, Rome–in the 1980s, asking the same questions of different skies.

Upon returning to Turkey, military service offered time for reflection. He knew then: cinema would not be a passion. It would be a life.

Foray into the filmmaking

He enrolled at Mimar Sinan University’s film program–and at over 30, was its oldest student. Impatient with institutions, he left after two years. Why wait for permission to create, when you already see the world like a director?

Ceylan’s work would go on to redefine Turkish cinema–and quietly upend global expectations of storytelling. But it all began in that childhood silence, where a boy watched the snow fall and saw possibility rather than absence.

But watching wasn’t enough. In the early 1990s, Ceylan stepped in front of the camera for a short film by his friend Mehmet Eryılmaz. He immersed himself in the entire technical process, from lighting to editing.

That hands-on experience was catalytic. He bought a camera, scraped together film stock–expired reels from Turkey’s state broadcaster and black-market negatives from post-Soviet Russia–and began work on Koza (Cocoon), his first short.

Shot in 1993 and completed on a shoestring, Koza carried a quiet intensity that caught the attention of global cinema. In 1995, it became the first Turkish short film ever selected for competition at Cannes.

For a debut filmmaker with no formal film school degree and no industry connections, it was a seismic moment.

But Ceylan wasn’t chasing glamour. He turned inward instead. His next two features, Kasaba (The Small Town, 1997) and Mayıs Sıkıntısı (Clouds of May, 1999), were cinematic meditations on rural life, inspired by his own childhood in Anatolia.

He cast his parents and his cousin, Mehmet Emin Toprak because they inhabited those landscapes authentically. These were not stories told about people; they were stories told with them.

Whispering through lenses

Then came Uzak (Distant, 2002), the film that vaulted him from indie obscurity to international acclaim.

A meditation on alienation and modernity in Istanbul, Uzak won the Grand Prix and Best Actor awards at Cannes. But the triumph was tragically undercut.

Just months before the festival, Toprak died in a car crash returning from the Ankara Film Festival. His absence left a permanent scar on Ceylan’s work.

You can feel that grief in every frame that followed.

Loss, time, and emotional paralysis haunt Ceylan’s cinema. His 2006 film İklimler (Climates) marks a pivotal shift: for the first time, his wife Ebru played a major role onscreen.

Offscreen, she became a central collaborator, co-writing nearly all of his subsequent scripts. Her voice helped inject a necessary tension into Ceylan’s often male-centric narratives–a quiet but forceful reckoning with the patriarchal impulses embedded in Turkish society, and in the men who inhabit his films.

Together, they built stories that did not shout, but echoed–deep, slow, and enduring.

Where others chased pace, Ceylan pursued silence. Where others gave answers, he left questions hanging in the Anatolian air.

And the world kept watching

Success at Cannes didn’t dull their edge. If anything, the string of accolades–the Grand Prix for Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and the Palme d’Or for Winter Sleep (2014)--only sharpened the couple’s creative vision.

Ebru and Nuri Bilge Ceylan became one of the most quietly formidable duos in world cinema, producing films that rejected conventional narrative arcs in favor of slow-burning philosophical excavation.

True cinematic beauty

Ceylan’s cinema has never been about spectacle. It's about what remains unsaid across a dinner table, or what silence between two people can mean after a decade of cohabitation.

His stories unfold in rural backwaters or on the outskirts of cities–places where dreams collect dust and truth is buried beneath layers of habit, pride, and longing.

The drama isn’t loud; it simmers.

Much of it is autobiographical, though not in obvious ways. The ants that Nuri once watched as a boy reappear in Koza and The Wild Pear Tree (2018) as metaphors for patience, observation, and small, unseen struggles.

His protagonists, often writers, teachers, photographers–always observers–wrestle with failure and self-deception. They are not heroes or villains.

They are human beings trying, and often failing, to live meaningfully.

And yet, it’s not the dialogue that does the heavy lifting in a Ceylan film–it’s the landscape. Snowfall isn’t background; it’s character. The wind speaks. Roads stretch endlessly, not to suggest progress, but isolation.

Long takes, wide frames, and unhurried pacing do more than aestheticize rural Turkey–they immerse the viewer in a kind of psychic terrain. The environment in his films doesn’t mirror the internal state of the characters; it embodies it.

There’s no room in Ceylan’s worldview for binaries. He rejects neat moral or ideological divisions.

As he’s said in interviews, human behavior is circumstantial–people shift, bend, and betray their own values depending on context.

His latest film, About Dry Grasses (2023), continues this exploration, centering on a disillusioned art teacher in Eastern Anatolia whose cynicism masks deeper, unresolved wounds.

The film doesn’t offer redemption. It doesn’t even offer clarity. It simply observes–and asks the audience to do the same.

Ceylan’s endings rarely resolve anything. Characters walk off into uncertain landscapes, or sit silently in unresolved thought. Closure is a foreign concept. And that’s the point.

In a cinematic world obsessed with catharsis, Nuri Bilge Ceylan reminds us that life, like art, often leaves us suspended– somewhere between meaning and emptiness, searching for answers that may never come.

—

Humayun Ahmed Shrabon is a filmmaker and film activist