Best director at Cannes shoots on HDCAM

Celebrated Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan shot his latest feature, Three Monkeys, with an HDW-F900. The film, which was shown In Competition at the Cannes Film Festival 2008, won Ceylan the prize for Best Director.

Three Monkeys follows the story of a dysfunctional family that avoids facing the truth – not to see, hear, or talk about it – in a bid to stay together.

“It has always astonished me to see in the human soul the co-existence of the power to rule and the potential to forgive, the interest in the most holy and that of the lowest banality, and love and hate,” Ceylan says. “For this reason, dealing with the qualities of our inner world which cannot be formulated rationally and trying to comprehend it, has always been the foremost reason for me in making films.”

The HDW-F900 camcorder was supplied by leading Turkish company, Imaj. Ceylan has previously used HDCAM to shoot his work. His feature, Iklimler (Climates), was also shot with the HDW-F900 and was shown at Cannes in 2006. For both films, the director of photography was Gökhan Tiryaki.

28 July 2008