Three Monkeys

Üç maymun

(Turkey, 2008, 105 mins)

35mm

writer: Ebru Ceylan, Ercan Kesal, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
director of photography: Gökhan Tiryaki
editors: Ayhan Ergürsel, Bora Göksingöl, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
art director: Ebru Ceylan
sound engineer: Murat Senürkmez
producer: Zeynep Özbatur
coproducers: Fabienne Vonier, Valerio De Paolis, Cemal Noyan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
cast: Yavuz Bingöl, Hatice Aslan, Ahmet Rifat Sungar, Ercan Kesal, Cafer Köse, Gürkan Aydin

• IMDB Film Info
• www.nbcfilm.com/3maymun/
• Trailer

Several films at this year’s festival are laced with the noir themes of guilt, entrapment, and sacrifice. Revanche, from Austria, follows a pair of lovers after they rob a bank and have to deal with the unexpected consequences. Serbia’s The Trap explores the inner struggle of a man who must commit an unspeakable crime to pay his son’s hospital bills. And in Jerichow, an already rocky marriage is threatened by a drifter who grows close to the couple. Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Climates, WFF07) contributes this film named for the monkeys who know no evil. After an ambitious politician’s hit-and-run accident, he asks his driver to take the blame. Eyüp (played by Yavuz Bingöl, a well-known Turkish singer) agrees to go to prison in exchange for a little financial security for his family. But Eyüp’s teenage son, defiant and sulky, is getting roughed up by the local gangs. Trying to hold everything together is Hacer, the wife who desperately wants to protect her family. “Throughout, Ceylan and his co-writers — his wife Ebru Ceylan and actor Kesal — systematically withhold key information, keeping us as much out of the loop as his characters often are. Much of the film, crucially, revolves round the suspicions and anxieties of both father and son. Like previous Ceylan films, this one looks long and hard into the mysteries and self-destructive contradictions of the human heart, but the film's sombre, arguably pessimistic bent also finds room for Ceylan's blackly sardonic humour, embodied here by a running gag about an unintentionally eloquent cellphone ringtone.” — Jonathan Romney, Screen International. Winner, Best Director, 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

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