Clouds of May

Mayıs Sıkıntısı, 1999
Director & Writer: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cast: Mehmet Emin Toprak, Mehmet Emin Ceylan, Fatma Ceylan, Muzaffer Özdemir

Director and writer Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s second foray into feature-length filmmaking, Mayıs Sıkıntısı (Clouds of May) is actually a sort of “behind-the-scenes” movie about Ceylan’s previous film Kasaba (The Town). The overall story arc is about a director named Muzaffer who’s returning to the town where he was born and grew up in order to make a movie there but at the same time the film delves the “discontents” of the local folk as well. These two story lines are woven together in a recursive film-within-a-film construct in which both director Muzaffer and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who are making a film whose cast is drawn from their own surroundings, end up as guest actors in each other’s endeavors.