DVD News: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

I mentioned this film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia earlier in the year when it had a limited release. Like so many subtitled films (Headhunters, Silence) I wasn't able to see it at the cinema however it has just been released on DVD and it's on my library's catalogue so I've reserved it. As it's classed as "World Cinema" it bypasses the top-title two-day loan category (non-reservable to boot) and goes straight to 7 day loan (£1.50). This is particularly useful for Once Upon a Time in Anatolia which is nearly three hours long so will be watched over several evenings!

An epic and rigorous tale of a night and day in a murder investigation, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a beautifully photographed crime drama about police and prosecutors locating a buried body through one long night in the Anatolian steppes.

In the short prologue three men are drinking and talking. Then a convoy of cars is travelling around the countryside at night as one of the men seen earlier is trying to remember where a body was buried. After several false leads and a rest in a remote village, the body is finally discovered early the next morning. In the course of the long investigation the characters and hidden thoughts of the main protagonists are gradually themselves exhumed.

Film News: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

The Turkish film, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia has its UK release on 16 March according to UK Film dates. There appears to be the odd showing in the UK before then. I can't find a very detailed synopsis (other than: "A group of men set out in search of a dead body in the Anatolian steppes") so here is a sample from the TimeOut review:

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is a crime movie, but not as you know it, and as well as asking us to puzzle together fragments of a murder case, it also offers rich, and sometimes comic, ruminations on city, small-town and village attitudes, on cynical versus more feeling attitudes to life, on our ability to separate the personal and the professional and on the banalities that arises even in extreme, unusual situations. It might be about a murder, but it’s also about the passing of time (and, in a subtly different way, passing the time), and to stress both, Ceylan asks that we share nearly three hours with him and his film.

We follow a group of 12 men in three vehicles – policemen, soldiers, two suspects, a doctor, a prosecutor and two men with shovels – as they trawl the countryside at night looking for a buried body, trying and failing several times before they make some progress. One minute they’re looking for freshly dug earth, the next they’re discussing the merits of cheese or the tell-tale signs of prostate cancer. With two prisoners in tow, they make a pit-stop at a village where we get a naturalistic portrait of everyday relations and where small, endearing differences emerge between the town folk of the investigation and their rural hosts. Back on the road, Ceylan moves around characters, and sometimes leaves them behind altogether for some staggering landscape shots. Night becomes dawn, and only when it’s morning do they return to town and the final chapter of the film unfolds in a police station and doctor’s surgery.

Possible UK posters: