As discouraging art-house titles go, About Dry Grasses is a cracker, right up there for me with an early Ozu, I Was Born, But… . In almost every other way too, the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ninth feature would seem to make the perfectly pretentious date movie in a Woody Allen comedy.
It is three hours 17 minutes long. It is set in one of the bleakest places ever, a small town, Ĭncesu, in the province of Erzurum in Turkey’s Eastern Anatolia, on a high steppe blanketed in snow for six months each winter. It’s about the travails of a disgruntled 30-something schoolteacher, Samet, stranded in this hell-hole on a compulsory four-year posting (these places have to have their own schools because for much of the year bussing the kids elsewhere is impossible).
Content from our partners
