Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

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"I think the human face is the most beautiful landscape," Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan said in an interview with The Telegraph. "The face tells you everything. It's the only way to get to the truth because, most of the time, the words we say are not true. We have a tendency to deceive others to protect ourselves."

Nuri directed and co-wrote the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year.

What he said made me think. Are the words we speak mostly untrue? My first instinct was to say no, but is it my unwavering belief in the goodness of humanity that perhaps blinds me to the truth?

“I don’t have very optimistic feelings about life,” Nuri said. “I like to look at things realistically – and with that realism comes pessimism. Man is dark. You feel the darkness inside your soul all the time and you feel the potential for evil.”

I know evil. Or, at least I think I do. It's  there, inside all of us ... inside me. On most days, it's buried deep deep below I even forget it exists. Most days it happens to people and in places far away from us. Wars in Afghanistan, repression in the Middle East. It's easy to read through the headlines and not recognize it for what it is.

And then there are times when you feel it quietly worm its way through your soul. Your anger can breed and fester into hate. It can happen to the most gentle of us, the kindest. Perhaps evil is a necessary human condition. Or perhaps, good and evil are always in a constant flux; one wanes while the other waxes. Who knows really.

I'm thirty two and these things still baffle me. Still, I seek the answers.


 

Click here to read the interview.
Click here to read Seongyong Cho's review of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. 

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