This is how cinema should be made! And this is what cinema should look like.

What do I mean?

What is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia actually about? An investigation? A murder? Probably those too. But what I see above all is a piece of the real world, shown at a particular time and in a particular place.

I see ordinary people with different jobs and different roles in society — a doctor, a prosecutor, police officers, drivers, villagers — who aren’t constantly delivering lines the script needs, but simply having ordinary conversations. About eating yoghurt, trouble sleeping, family, work, minor ailments and the things people actually talk about when they spend hours together.

The film’s entire world is believable down to the smallest detail. The cars, clothes, faces, roads, interiors, lighting, objects. Nothing looks like a carefully arranged set designed to announce: ‘Here is rural Turkey.’ The same goes for the actors. They don’t look like a carefully selected cast, but like people we might actually meet in a place like this — each with their own face, build, age, weariness and manner. Very quickly, you stop feeling that you’re watching actors playing parts and simply start observing people.

When the characters enter a village house at night, we almost feel as though we’ve been invited in ourselves. We can sit at the table with them, eat lamb, tear off pieces of bazlama and watch what ordinary life looks like for people living thousands of kilometres away.

And that is exactly why I find this kind of cinema interesting. It lets us discover something of people’s culture, customs and way of thinking without leaving home. Not through a tourist brochure, not through an exotic postcard and not through a Turkish soap opera. And certainly not through yet another American blockbuster about flying people.

Then there is the space. The film shows central Anatolia as a land of vast, almost empty expanses — roads disappear into the darkness, hills and steppe stretch between settlements, and people seem small in this landscape. That too is part of the story of a place.

Here is Turkish realism.