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Nuri Bilge Ceylan likes to take his time. The Turkish director is one of the greatest living practitioners of slow cinema. The filmmaking ethos — pioneered by Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky and taken up by the likes of Theo Angelopoulos, Albert Serra, Béla Tarr, Kelly Reichardt and Lav Diaz — eschews the rapid editing and relentless nonstop forward-driving plots of the Hollywood blockbuster (looking at you, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) for a more contemplative, metaphysical approach.

The characters in a Ceylan movie don’t do much. There’s little action or traditional suspense, and the storylines are fairly basic. In 2002’s Distant, a rural factory worker visits his cousin in Istanbul. Homicide police unearth the body of a murder victim and take a long drive back to the city for the autopsy in 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. An old actor, his wife and his sister sit...

Following The Wild Pear Tree, Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been working on his next feature for some time and is poised for a return to Cannes Film Festival next year. In the meantime, the opportunity to revisit one of his most acclaimed films has arrived. Distant, which premiered 20 years ago this year in Turkey followed by a stop at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival where it won both the Grand Pix and Best Actor for Muzaffer Özdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak, is now returning to theaters.

The film––which follows a divorced photographer’s life of solitary routine beging interrupted when a distant cousin from his remote village comes to stay in his tiny Istanbul apartment, quickly outstaying his welcome––will get a re-release in select theaters across the U.S. beginning at May 20 at Film Forum. Ahead of the run, Big World Pictures has debuted a trailer.

Watch below.

The works of Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has often been labeled “slow cinema”, and thus have often been mentioned with the filmography of directors such as Lav Diaz or Bela Tarr. However, as we often see with the features of these filmmakers, the term is often confusing, derogatory even, as it attempts to focus solely on aspects like duration, but not the contextual reason why these stories need to be told in that particular pace. Perhaps one of the best examples for Ceylan’s brand of “slow cinema” (if you really want to use that word) is his first feature “Kasaba” from 1997 which takes its time dealing with the story of a family living in a small rural town, with their struggles and conflicts in many ways reflecting the view on Turkish society, most specifically its problematic view on the past and its link to the present.

“Kasaba” is...

From Turkish versions of Tarzan and Dracula to wintry weepies, via (whisper it) Midnight Express, Fiachra Gibbons picks out the best films shot in Istanbul

• As featured in our Istanbul city guide

From Russia with Love, Terence Young, 1963

"They dance for him, they yearn for him, they die for him …" From Russia with Love is not only arguably the best of the Bond films, it set the template for all that followed, right down to the corny one-liners. This is Tatiana, the Russian double-agent love interest succumbing to Sean Connery's charms: "The mechanism is… Oh James… Will you make love to me all the time in England?" "Day and night, darling… Go on about the mechanism…" The film was shot when the city's population was less than two million (it has mushroomed to more than 13 million today), and it's a magic carpet ride back to a time when Istanbul teemed with hamals,...

Elephant, Gus Van Sant's take on the Columbine high school massacre, scooped the top prize, the Palme d'Or, as well as the best director award at the 56th Festival de Cannes on Sunday. The minimalist movie, which used a non-professional cast, was produced by HBO Films, Meno Film Co. and Blue Relief. It will be distributed in France by independent MK2. The runner-up award, the Grand Prix, went to Uzak directed by Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The movie, something of an outsider for major honors, also took the best actor award, which was shared by its stars Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak. Best actress went to Marie-Josee Croze for her role in The Barbarian Invasion which also took best screenplay for writer-director Denys Arcand of Canada.