I watched “Clouds of May” with much anticipation, having been a fan of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s later works such as “Uzak” and “Climates”. I must say that this film never disappoints me; it is a beautiful portrait of a rural Turkish community – a filmmaker returns to his hometown to make a film with his parents and friends as the cast; yet just as he was engaged with the desire to capture his perception of the life of people in this small town, he missed out in the most important things. I think that the simplicity of the stories scattered throughout the film captivates me most: a kid had a wager with his parents, to keep an egg with him for 40 days and not to break it; a paranoid old man obsessed with keeping his rights to the land he had been living and cultivating; a young man whose only thoughts are to escape from the rural area and work in Istanbul.

The universality of these stories really made me connect to many personal memories and stories in my life growing up as a kid and becoming a young adult. All these stories were told with arresting imageries of the rural landscape, and finally the way the films end is simply poetic – the sun rising and engulfing the sight of the old man.