Word: turkishly
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Celebrated Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan was awarded Best Director in Cannes on Sunday. Perhaps now Turks will finally go see his movies. Despite being heralded globally for his movie magic, Ceylan's films - slow-paced, poetic tales of individuals struggling against the bleak backdrop of modern Turkey - routinely flop back home. Distant, a previous Cannes competitor, was seen by just 20,000 people in Turkey - only one-fourth as many as saw it in France. His current Cannes winner, Three Monkeys, has yet to sell to Turkish TV, which has deemed it too arty...
Then again, to give Turkish audiences their credit, maybe Ceylan's previous films were just really, really slow. "Viewers have become used to the fast-paced style of ads, music videos and news shows that jump from scene to scene; this manifests itself in an impatience towards films which tease their stories out slowly," says Firat Yucel, editor of the film magazine Altyazi...
...secrets. In tone, if not style, it is a departure for Ceylan and has even been described as a thriller, albeit a meditative one. "Hopefully the Cannes charm might coax viewers into giving Ceylan a chance," says film critic Emrah Guler. And if that's not enough to get Turkish moviegoers to the theaters, the director stands in good company, with the likes of Woody Allen, of filmmakers embraced by the arty French but neglected at home...
...Turkish director's 2006 romance Climates was so popular worldwide that it was at the center of a funny short film the Coen brothers contributed to last year's celebration of the 6oth Cannes Festival. So there were high hopes for Ceylan's new effort: the story of a politician, involved in a hit-and-run accident, who convinces his driver to take the rap, then has an affair with the driver's wife while the man is in prison. If you think this sounds like some crackling crime yarn from James M. Cain or Patricia Highsmith...
...Dozens of children aged between 10 and 16 have landed in recent months on the remote island of Leros, near the Turkish coast. They arrived in Greece without their parents, a worrisome pattern immigration experts say is increasingly common. Most of the 121 children held on the island are from Afghanistan, but there are also Palestinians and Eritrians, said Sophia Ioannou, spokeswoman for the Greek branch of the humanitarian aid group Médecins du Monde (MdM). She said all the children were crammed into a single facility without enough beds or toilets...