The Small Town

The Small Town follows life in a small Turkish village as seen through the eyes of two children. A girl and her younger brother move between school, the countryside and home, and the film unfolds across the seasons: a snowy winter morning on the way to class gives way to a summer evening when the family gathers around a fire at the edge of a field. In the classroom, the children are taught how society works and how they are expected to fit into it. Around the fire, they listen as the adults' conversation drifts toward death, poverty, reputation and disappointment, and the siblings begin to glimpse the complications of the grown-up world alongside the mysteries of the natural one. Nuri Bilge Ceylan wrote and directed the film, his first, and also shot it in black and white. Sadık İncesu produced it through NBC Film. The cast includes Havva Sağlam as Asiye, Cihat Bütün as Ali, Mehmet Emin Toprak as Saffet, Sercihan Alioğlu as Baba, and Fatma and Mehmet Emin Ceylan as the grandmother and grandfather. The film runs 85 minutes. On IMDb it holds a 7 out of 10 from around 7,200 votes, while on TMDB its average is 6.6 from a much smaller group of 119 votes, so the two audiences are broadly in agreement. It stands at the start of the director's filmography, before the features that followed in the 2000s and 2010s.