Winter closes in on a remote Anatolian village, and with it comes a young teacher's fading hope of ever leaving, in About Dry Grasses, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 2023 drama set in rural Turkey.
What is About Dry Grasses about?
About Dry Grasses follows a young art teacher counting down his mandatory service at a small school in a remote village, holding onto a transfer to Istanbul as his only way out. When a student raises accusations of inappropriate contact against him and a colleague, his path toward the city closes off, and he sinks deeper into frustration with the isolation, the cold, and the compromises of small-town life. A colleague at the school offers him a different way of seeing his circumstances, one that has less to do with escape and more with how he chooses to live where he is. Ceylan builds the film slowly, letting long conversations and the bleak beauty of the steppe carry as much weight as plot.
About the cast
Deniz Celiloğlu leads the ensemble as the teacher at the center of the story, with Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici, Ece Bağcı, Erdem Şenocak, Yüksel Aksu, Münir Can Cindoruk, and Onur Berk Arslanoğlu filling out the village around him.
Context & significance
A co-production between France, Germany, Sweden, and Turkey, About Dry Grasses continues Nuri Bilge Ceylan's long-running interest in rural Anatolia as a setting for stories about isolation, ambition, and compromise. At 197 minutes, the film takes its time, using the region's flat winter landscape and a school posting far from any city as the backdrop for a teacher's slow reckoning with his own choices. The film reached a wide critical audience on the festival circuit and carries a strong reputation among admirers of Ceylan's earlier work.
Watching About Dry Grasses on Ktime
About Dry Grasses is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, giving Farsi-speaking viewers a way to follow this dialogue-heavy drama comfortably. A free K-Time account login is needed to stream the film, while the page itself can be browsed without signing in. K-Time's Farsi-first design makes a long, dialogue-driven drama like this one as accessible to Persian-speaking audiences as any title built with them specifically in mind.