About Dry Grasses

Set in a tight-knit community that seems to only experience two seasons, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest probes into power dynamics and the darkest regions of the human soul.

Middle-aged Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) is a quick-witted and quick-to-anger elementary school art teacher in a traditional village who dreams of a posting in his native Istanbul. He shares lodging with his colleague Kenan (Musab Ekici) and spends his nihilistic days developing an inappropriate fixation on 14-year-old teacher’s pet Sevim (Ece Bagci).

When a love note written by Sevim is confiscated in a school-wide search, Samet’s rotten-to-the-core fantasies grow and an investigation is launched. Enter Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a fellow teacher whose past political activism has rendered her disabled, allowing her to choose postings anywhere in the state — just the escape Samet needs.

About Dry Grasses is a film laden with longing. While Samet blurs the lines between what’s expected and acceptable, we are in the hands of a master filmmaker who captures the full picture in his lens, and whose observation of power dynamics leads us through a tale as old as time in a way that few would dare.