TEHRAN – The Cinematheque of the Iranian Artists Forum (IAF) will screen the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s movie ‘The Wild Pear Tree’ in the Nasseri Hall of the forum on Monday.  

Co-written by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan and Akin Aksu, ‘The Wild Pear Tree’ is a 2018 Turkish drama. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. It was also selected as the Turkish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards, but it was not nominated.

The film is about Sinan, an aspiring young writer who has just finished college. Returning to his hometown of Çan, he sets about trying to find local funding to publish his debut manuscript, which he calls a "quirky auto-fiction meta-novel", but finds that the locals are uninterested. He also discovers that his eccentric father, Idris, has allowed his gambling addiction to disastrously reduce the family's fortune and stature. Worried about his career prospects and finding himself socially isolated in his rural hometown, Sinan wanders the countryside and engages in a series of testy conversations with various relatives and locals.

Dogu Demirkol, Murat Cemcir, Bennu Yildirimlar and Hazar Ergüçlü are among the cast of the Turkish drama.

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan describes the project as being inspired by a father and son who were neighbors of his near Çanakkale, Turkey, where he grew up.

Lead actor Dogu Demirkol had never acted in a film before, and Ceylan found him on Facebook. Ceylan described him as "...the smartest actor I've met to this day."

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 81 critic reviews are positive, and the average rating is 8.4/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "The Wild Pear Tree uses a young man's post-graduation experience to pose thoughtful, engaging questions about life in modern Turkey — and the rest of the world."According to Metacritic, which calculated an average score of 86 out of 100 based on 21 critics, the film received "universal acclaim". It was one of the best-reviewed films to premier at Cannes in 2018.

ZM/