Europe Endless - The Mediterranean: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Dir Nuri Bilge Ceylan , 2h37m, 2011)
So far on this journey, we have crossed backwards and forward in time and space as we travelled across Europe. So far, we have rarely seen a pattern in European cinema - yes, there is a preponderance towards naturalism, towards the verité in the films we have considered so far, but cinema has long been as much about reportage as it is about telling stories. This final leg will take us from one side of Europe to the other, from the Bosphorus to the Straits of Gibraltar, as we consider the cinemas of the Mediterranean. Yet, for all the distance travelled between our last stop in Bucharest in the heart of Romania, and this cinematic expedition into rural Anatolia, we must once again consider slow cinema, at the hands of one of its master craftsmen, Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan, as a single night unites a group of men hunting for the body of a murder victim, who find much more than this. Whilst many of the nations we have visited so far can narrow the birth of their nascent cine...
