Winter Sleep is a movie that won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival
in 2014. It is directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan who has a worldwide reputation and
prestige. Let us also add that this movie won the FIBRESCI award, and it has more
accomplishments at the box office than the director’s other movies, which have more
stable cinematic language.
In regard to the narrative of Winter Sleep, although the preference for space is made
effortlessly, through common sense and intuition, it is the right choice for sure. The
reason for that is that Cappadocia and the Turkish intellectuals have identical attributes.
Rough life climbing up a magnificent history, structures in which makeshift lives with
a profound past reside as well as a sophisticated spatial formation that undertakes the
duty of reflecting the silence that mocks its miserable people, and a generation that has
been brought up incorrectly, corruptly mediating the vulgarized use of a magnificent
architecture.
Winter Sleep is filled with these, and it is truly a film of melancholia. Because the
director went about his creation in a place where the psychopathology of the space and
the problems of our intellectual intersect, paradoxically, the work has found a strong
structural foundation. That is to say, the success of Winter Sleep comes from the fact
that it approached the architecture of Cappadocia, which had been used as a gallery of
cliches and antiquity until then, with a negative commentary. The significance of the
movie lies in the fact that it judges, or rather dissects, our intellect through the
mistreated, hurt, and pessimistic appearance of Cappadocia.
On the one hand, corrupted intellectuals, who are looking for a remedy for their
hopeless spiritual wounds in suffocating hazy, narrow rooms and in depressing spaces
that are engaged with mazes, make their games central to their lives.
Keywords: Aziz Nesin, atilla İlhan, architecture in Cinema, alev Alatlı, auteur, cannes Film Festivali, cappadocia, disneyland, demet Akbağ, ebru Ceylan, golden Palm, haluk Bilginer, jacobenism, kış Uykusu, melisa Sözen, nuri Bilge Ceylan, nejat İşler, orhan Pamuk, turkish cinema, the matter of intellectuals, touristic destination.