Clouds of MayMovies like Clouds of May
- Key Features:
- Filmmaking, Family dynamics, Existentialism, Coming-of-age, Social commentary, Rural setting, Personal growth, Relationships, Dreams, Aspiration, Contemplative, Character study
- Tone:
- restrained, earnest
- Target Audience:
- Film enthusiasts, Introspective viewers, Art house aficionados, Students of cinema
- Emotional Arc:
- ['Introspection → Contentment']
Clouds of May

An aspiring filmmaker visits his parents and begins to devise a movie. Amidst creating and casting for the film, he encounters with family & friends who struggle with their own problems, dreams and life.
Clouds of May
A story in four parts is told from the perspective of two children, showing life in school, in nature, with family and at home. All of this unfolding along with the seasons. The Small Town depicts life in the village, while also portraying the relationships between members of a small-town family, in a long centerpiece scene around a campfire with family members talking about the past, life and its disappointments. Both brother and sister witness the complexities and darkness of the adult world, as well as the mysteries of nature and wildlife.

Man was made to be happy for simple reasons and unhappy for even simpler ones – just as he is born for simple reasons and dies for even simpler ones... Isa and Bahar are two lonely figures dragged through the ever-changing climate of their inner selves in pursuit of a happiness that no longer belongs to them.

Aydın is a hotel owner and a retired actor in rural Turkey. As winter emerges he begins navigating the conflicts within the relationships with his wife, sister and existence.

A young man from rural Turkey arrives in Istanbul with dreams working on a ship and stays with a cousin while he searches for work. Over time, the former’s struggles to find employment and the latter’s troubles and disappointments strain their relationship and living situation.

A young art teacher hopes to be transferred to Istanbul after completing his mandatory duty in a remote village school in Anatolia. After accusations of inappropriate contact with a student surface, his hopes of escape fade and he descends further into an existential crisis.

In a small, poor village leaning over high rocky mountains, the villagers are simple and diligent people who struggle to cope with a harsh nature. They earn their living off the earth and a few animals they feed. Fathers always prefer one of their sons. Mothers command their daughters ruthlessly. Ömer, the son of the imam, wishes hopelessly for the death of his father. When he understands that wishful thinking does not have any concrete results, he begins to search for childish ways to kill his father. Yakup is in love with his teacher, and one day after seeing his father spying on the teacher he dreams too, like Ömer, of killing his father. Yıldız studies and tries to manage the household chores imposed by her mother. She learns with irritation about the secrets of the relationship between men and women.

The three human characters are an old man, an old woman, and a young boy, who wander among the natural wonders and give the camera soulful looks.

Fresh out of university, a Turkish young man with literary aspirations returns to his home village, and to his father, a debt-ridden man with a gambling problem.

In the southeast region of Turkey, the Kurdish family of Altun lives in a small mountainside village plagued by a 25-year war that makes their daily lives a hellish struggle. As the war intensifies, the family is forced to migrate west to the city of Istanbul.

A family battles against the odds to stay together when small lies grow into an extravagant cover-up. In order to avoid hardship and responsibilities that would otherwise be impossible to endure, the family chooses to ignore the truth, not to see, hear or talk about it. But does playing “Three Monkeys” invalidate the truth of its existence?

A high school graduate, Yusuf could not pass the university entrance exam. Writing poetry is his greatest passion and some of his poems are being printed in various obscure literary journals. But neither these poems, nor the rapidly falling price of the milk they sell, are being of any benefit to Yusuf and Zehra's lives. When Yusuf finds out about Zehra's secret affair with the town's stationmaster he gets disconcerted. Will he find the way to cope with his anxiety for the unknown future, the rapid change that he is going through and the pain of taking a step into adulthood and leaving his youth behind

In the remote and undeveloped eastern Black Sea region, a six-year-old boy (Yusuf) wanders through the woods searching for his lost father, trying to make sense of his life.His father is a beekeeper whose bees have disappeared unexpectedly, threatening his livelihood. A bizarre accident kills the father.There is little dialogue or music in the film. The three main characters (Yusuf and his parents) are all fairly taciturn, and the soundtrack is filled out with the sounds of the forest and the creatures that live there.The environment is a recurring theme.

Three strangers with one thing in common — the same father — come to a Turkish village to bury him, and learn about him and each other.

A group of men lead a search for a victim of a murder to whom a suspect named Kenan and his mentally challenged brother confessed. However, the search is proving more difficult than expected as Kenan is fuzzy as to the body's location. As the group continues looking, its members can't help but chat among themselves about everyday life, as the conversations turn more and more profound and existential.

The neurotic Fikret and tavern singer Solmaz, whose 21 year long relationships end on the same day, meet through a funny coincidence. When Solmaz's daughter Zeynep decides to marry her lover from Adana, the ever-fearful Fikret ends up having to play the role of his life. Intended at first to be kept in the family, the wedding becomes a much bigger event upon the insistence of the groom's relatives. Can our heroes come to terms with the traditional Adana family who carry guns and own a kebab restaurant chain, and see the wedding through without mishaps?

A scheming tobacco farmer sets out to ruin his competition by diverting the local water to his own property.

A left-wing journalist whose wife died while giving birth to his son during a military coup returns to his family's farm. Estranged from his father for turning his back on the family and wasting his life with political activism instead, he tries to reconnect with him so that his son will have a place to live as his health is deteriorating due to the extensive torture he had to endure.

Poet Yusuf (35-38) returns to his childhood hometown, which he hadn't visited for years, upon his mother's death. He is faced with a neglected, crumbling house. Ayla, a young girl (17-19) awaits him there. Yusuf has been unaware of the existence of this distant relation who had been living with his mother for five years; He stays by his dead mother's bedside for a while on the morning of his return...

Entrenched in a midlife crisis, Aziz seeks solace from his mundane job, lonesome friends and rowdy family while pretending to have his act together.

Asya, a peasant girl, marries İlyas, a truck driver. The couple, who love each other very much, are separated when İlyas cheats on her, and their epic love story comes to an unexpected end. After that, Asya takes her son and wanders away, not knowing where she is going, until a familiar hand reaches out to help her selflessly.

Celal, who dreams of achieving happiness as a ladies' man and charmer, soon gets into difficulties and suffers misfortune. Back when Celal was in a relationship, he was jealous of the life of a bachelor.

The lives of six German-Turkish immigrants are drawn together by circumstance: An old man and a prostitute forging a partnership, a young scholar reconciling his past, two young women falling in love, and a mother putting the shattered pieces of her life back together.

An ingenuous countryman Ali Nazik migrates to Istanbul and meets producer Mr. Muhsin to have his first album.

In a small Turkish town, two young tuberculous poets try to survive while publishing their poems. As they both fall in love, their life would never be the same.

Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural Kurdish village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.

Based on a true story set in 1948, customs officer Mehti is faced with the duty of formally setting up the border between Turkey and Syria, dividing his hometown. He is unaware of the pain that will eminently unfold, as families, languages, cultures and lovers are both ripped apart and clash head on in a village once united.

In a Turkish village, five orphaned sisters live under strict rule while members of their family prepare their arranged marriages.

Working in a ferry as a waiter, Ayzek, having a defect with his front teeth, dreams to get his front teeth fixed and to marry his girlfriend, Songül. The news gets out that the ferry company is turning over the management to a new one and the whole crew is to be interviewed. When the interviewer arrives on board, Ayzek’s world is turned upside down.

When aspiring musician and student Deniz falls for a rough-hewn motorbike racer, tragedy and family opposition obstruct their path to love.

At 2 Ela lost her ability of seeing and hearing because of a severe illness. And then she became a total disappointment of her family due to her untamed behaviors. But everything changed after an unorthodox teacher stepped into their lives to educate Ela while healing himself.

A love story between a poor man and a rich girl. The rich girl's father tries to prevent their marriage and he declares a war against the poor boy's family.

A pretty young girl falls for an enigmatic, shy man who sweeps her off her feet. She becomes pregnant but is not allowed to tell him. His advisers are adamant. Back home, they have set up a wedding with the daughter of an antagonistic family and marriage will put an end to the blood feud between them.

A newly reunited father and son grapple with new beginnings after tragedy, but can they manage to fill the void left by a beloved wife and mother?

Hale attracted attention with its different appearance and strange behavior. She lives in a historical and eerily house in Nevsehir with her mother, a depressed grandmother and her aunt Azra. Hale's father had disappeared before she was born and was never seen again. Hale sees a nightmare of a terrible night; her father, whom she never saw, invites her to an old and uncanny home.

Ismail's son, Tarik returns to his village after long years of being away and announces that he is engaged to a Latvian woman named Nugesha and although he doesn't have the means for it, Ismail still wants to be the one who pays for the expenses of the wedding. Several problems ensue as he tries to make sure that there is enough money for the wedding.

A director faces creative block while working on his latest film – a reimagination of his adolescence growing up in a mountain village in rural Japan.

Alper is a renowned chef in his 30s at his own luxury restaurant. He lives an isolated life and spends his nights with one-night stands and paid intercourses. One day, his life changes utterly when his path crosses with Ada and gets enamored by her casual and modest outlook at life. As they start to get romantically involved, Alper must also overcome his chronic feeling of desolateness.

The family of an older man who runs a small sake brewery become concerned with his finances and his health after they discover him visiting an old mistress from his youth.

Two resentful, singer brothers Hakan and Ozan who can't get along well. Meet again in their father's funeral. Even though they want to get back to their daily lives after the funeral, their father's will won't allow it. They will take a journey with their dead father's old car in order to carry out his bequest which is to sing at a wedding in Urla.

25-year-old Sibel lives with her father and sister in a secluded village in the mountains of Turkey’s Black Sea region. Sibel is a mute, but she communicates by using the ancestral whistled language of the area.

Sinan is sent to Capadocia by his boss, Isfendiyar to write a screenplay. As he waits for inspiration, Sinan finds himself running first into Eylul, the daughter of Izzet, who owns the hotel where he's booked to stay, and then into soap opera star Faruk, his former good friend and present enemy. It isn't long before cabdriver Lokman, who declares himself Sinan's 'chauffeur' and Arif, a local farmer and horse breeder, are part of both Sinan's life and his screenplay. Although plentiful adventures among the magical fairy chimneys, colorful balloons and at the annual grape festival become like a movie for all involved, the happy ending awaited by the boss, Isfendiyar never happens. But the boss insists on his happy ending. And Sinan has to write that ending!

Set in Genoa, the film concerns the financial struggles and emotional strain that occur after Michele loses his job. He and his wife Elsa are forced to give up their affluent lifestyle and cope with the tensions of moving into a smaller home, finding new work, and making sacrifices.

An intimate study of two women friends who come to each other because of troubles with everyday life and with men and thus try to enjoy a life based on their ideas.

Yusuf and his best friend Memo are pupils at a boarding school for Kurdish boys, secluded in the mountains of Eastern Anatolia. When Memo falls mysteriously ill, Yusuf is forced to struggle through the bureaucratic obstacles put up by the school's repressive authorities to try to help his friend. But by the time the adults in charge finally understand the seriousness of Memo's condition and try to get him to the hospital, the school has been buried under a sudden, heavy snowfall. With no way out and now desperate to reach help, teachers and pupils engage in a blame game where grudges, feelings of guilt and hidden secrets emerge, as time ticks mercilessly on and threatens to run out.

Areum sits in a small café, typing on her laptop. Around her, customers enact various dramas from their lives. Is she writing what she hears or is she hearing what's been written?

After living 45 years in Germany, the Turkish Hüseyin Yilmaz, seventy, announces to his family that he has bought a house in Turkey and they should return to make the necessary reforms. The idea is unwelcome and causes very heated discussions. In addition, Canan, a granddaughter of Hüseyin, announces she is pregnant and the father is her English boyfriend, and no one knew anything.

On a night of despair after being turned down continuously for the scripts he writes, Metin ends up in a bar where he meets a girl named Duygu. After spending the night together, she walks out in the morning before he wakes up and leaves only a short note. The next time they meet, Metin becomes curious about her secret and decides to follow her. What he finds out will be the beginning of an everlasting love.

In early 1970s, Adem is a boy living in an Aegean village with his family. He just finished the primary school and he wants to work while he's on summer holiday. He gets permission from his family to work for a soda pop seller named Ciber Kemal. But the Ramadan has just came and Adem wants to do his fast while he's working. But he starts seeing hallucinations because of the hot summer day. It seems it's going to be the longest day of Adem.

Diagnosed with a terminal illness, a single mother encounters a suave bachelor as she grapples with the future of her headstrong six-year-old.

In a small town in Anatolia, whose inhabitants possess various supernatural powers but still have to deal with ordinary problems, Cemal helps out in his father’s barbershop and, in his free time, acts as a football referee.

Bored with her life and inspired by a friend's wedding, Esra quits her job and dumps her boyfriend, leading to a series of romantic misadventures.

A veteran actress comes face-to-face with an uncomfortable reflection of herself when she agrees to take part in a revival of the play that launched her career 20 years earlier.

Celal, lives an unhappy family life with his wife Sevilay and his child in a small town. Celal and his brother Cemal, running an electrician shop which doesn't go well. They are in debt. The only fun they have is going to the night clubs in Samsun. Celal's love for Sibel Ceylan who works in the night club, will cause him trouble. Celal's wife, Sevilay, saves her money, sent by her father who lives in Germany. She is unaware of the fact that Celal knows her secret.

A tragicomedy dramatizing how an innocent villager is driven into the crime world only to collect enough cash to make his biggest dream come true: Return to his village home and marry the girl next door.

In the streets of Istanbul, ailing waste warehouse worker Mehmet takes a small boy under his wing and must soon confront his own traumatic childhood.

Two Greek children embark on a journey to search for their father, who supposedly lives in Germany.

Asa, a young and cheerful dreamer, returns from his Russian naval service to his sister’s nomadic family on the desolate Hunger Steppe of central Asia, so that he can begin his own life as a shepherd. But before he can tend a flock of his own, Asa must first win the hand of the only eligible girl for miles—his mysterious neighbor, Tulpan.

Marleen is in her early 20s, works in a movie theater, still lives at home and is somehow aimless. Her parents torment her with questions about her future and her brother is a high-flyer who has already traveled halfway around the world. When a tragic accident plunges her into sheer endless grief, Marleen just wants to get away. Equipped with the bare essentials, she sets off on a journey into the unknown.

After the death of his wife and father, Kudret, who has always lived by the book, decides to go on a road trip to save a girl.

1960s Turkey countryside. A newly assigned teacher finds out that the solitary village is missing a school. He gets fond of the village people and especially a disabled man. The teacher helps the village to build a new school and educate the children and the disabled man.

A stagnant and gloomy village in the 1980s. Reyhan, Nurhan, and Havva, three sisters were sent to town as 'besleme' (foster child and maid). Since they fail their foster parents for different reasons, they are sent back to their father's house in their poor village. Deprived of their dreams of a better life, they try to hold on to each other.

During summer vacation in a beachside town, 16-year-old Deniz seeks the affection of his childhood crush and navigates a love triangle.

A selfless young woman, the daughter of a middle-class refugee family from East Pakistan, sacrifices her own happiness for her unappreciative family.

Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother-in-law is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.

When the actor in a scene for his film Life And Nothing More… has to quit, a film director casts another man for the part. However, complications arise since the man and the woman who was cast for the scene know each other.

A traditional Turkish woman tries to find love and is forced by her family members to get married.

A young father and his two children struggle to find harmony after his wife leaves them for another man.

After her mother's death, six-year-old Frida is sent to her uncle's family to live with them in the countryside. But Frida finds it hard to forget her mother and adapt to her new life.

Lucía and her son live isolated from society in a flat place where there’s practically no life. The small family unit formed by mother and son hardly ever receives visitors, and their goal is to lead a quiet existence. At first they succeed, but the appearance of a mysterious, violent creature that starts stalking their small house will put the relationship that unites them to the test.

Year 1977, a September morning in Ankara... Yilmaz tries to rush his pregnant wife Neriman to the hospital and he crushes into Omer's car. This accident causes Omer's pregnant wife Inci, who was in the back seat, to have a pre-term labor. The babies are born on the same day. They see each other for the first time... This accident is the threshold of the coincidences that bring Ozgur and Deniz together.

Failed magician Iskender decides to do a tour to save his career, but has to bring his grumpy and senile father along. The tour is quite unexpectedly interrupted when a bride actually disappears from the stage.

An aggressive police officer tries to solve the mystery behind consecutive murders. While doing so, he must fight against his inner demons.

Lis is a teenager whose dream is to become a circus artist and leave her hometown, even if she knows that to do it she’ll have to fight her side against her parents. It’s summer and she spends her days playing with her friends and flirting with her boyfriend, a few years older than herself. The lack of privacy and the neighbours’ gossip force Lis to keep their relationship secret so that her parents won’t find out. A relationship which change her live forever.

A young woman of about 17 years old, named Meryem (Ozgu Namal), has been raped, and her village's customs call for her to be killed to restore honor and dignity to her family and village. The eldest son of the village leader, Cemal (Murat Han), is ordered to take Meryem to Istanbul and kill her, but at the last minute he cannot complete the task.

Orhan who lived in London for years and did not come back to Turkey agrees to help Deniz -a famous director- edit his first book. Deniz has been living in a mansion with his family which started to lose its old brightness and power. Orhan finds himself in the middle of Deniz's complicated relationships, mysterious friends and stange family members. This is the first movie of Ferzan Ozpetek which is shot in Turkey after a long time. It is also based on his own book which has the same name with the movie.

With the mayoral election approaching, the newly-appointed state prosecutor of a small town suffering from a water supply crisis gradually descends into trouble after a young local woman is raped.

A young student decides to have no more interaction with the world than is needed to minimally sustain life. His increasingly automaton-like behavior is coupled with a strange clarity of insight about the world around him.

A biopic about the Turkish vocal artist Müslüm Gürses. Born into a poor household, Muslum found his redemption in music from the initial trauma that lingered over his musical and personal life as internalizing the grief. He rose through his ashes of shattered dreams like a phoenix. He walked in darkness, sang songs filled with sorrow which stirred people's souls and created a cult following. They were calling him "Baba" (The Father).

Burdened by troubles and caught between cultures, Riza takes a job as a mall Santa and finds that real life may not be so different from make believe.

Shakir, who lives in Kayseri, has a great legacy from his uncle who died in Istanbul. His uncle sends a telegram to Kayseri and dies before seeing Shakir, but a relative who does not want to share the legacy begins to make plans to eliminate him.

Sailors want to remain in their small world, which is warm and cozy and full of lies, but their routine life turns upside down when one of them gets mugged and badly beaten.

Bihter, who is desperate for love, sees Adnan, a wealthy and respected older guy, as a way out of the stereotype that society and her materialistic mother have given her. But she soon discovers that she is not satisfied with his attention and has other needs.

Amaia has just become a mother, and the challenge is even more significant than she imagined. So when her partner has to leave for several weeks because of his job, she decides to spend time with her parents in a lovely coastal village in the Basque Country and hopefully share the responsibility of looking after her baby. However, she forgot that even when one becomes a parent, one never stops being a daughter.

A couple who dreamed of having a son had five daughters in a row. When girls reach the age of marriage, there are moments that make them laugh and sometimes make them sad.

A middle-aged woman leaves her partner and drifts back to her ex-husband, while the lives of her middle class friends intersect with her own.

Impoverished priest Harihar Ray leaves his rural Bengal village in search of work. His wife, Sarbojaya, looks after their rebellious daughter, Durga, and young son, Apu. The children enjoy the small pleasures of their difficult life.

An old villager deeply in love with his cow goes to the capital for a while. While he's there, the cow dies and now the villagers are afraid of his possible reaction to it when he returns.

Zuhtu, a nosy hawker who sells meatballs, one night finds a young girl escaping from her cruel relatives. He intends to help the girl but this costs him too much.

Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.

Hüseyin is a young man who lives with his grandfather and grandmother in a village in Thracian Turkey. The two great loves of his life are his clarinet and Müjgan, a nurse. Although Hüseyin is content with his life, with his music and dreams of Mügan, due to an unexpected development he leaves his village. He ends up in Istanbul where he finds support first in his clarinet and then in the friendship of the singer Firuzan. Firuzan is a popular nightclub performer who is eagerly working on an album as she leads a colorful but complicated life. When Firuzan meets Huseyin, the course of events gives away to a hilarious adventure.

From an intoxicating fantasy to a dangerous affair, a wealthy married woman finds her life irreversibly shattered after picking up an unpublished novel.

A robbery leaves a proprietor penniless before his wedding, but becoming a son-in-law to a second family might be the financial solution he needs.

On his 18th birthday, wealthy but spoiled Ozgur(Ekin Koc) gets a surprise from his deceased grandfather's will. He has to leave his luxurious life in Istanbul and graduate from a public school in a small village on the Aegean coast. After falling for Elif(Neslihan Atagul), a secretive classmate, Ozgur begins to understand the importance of this tiny and seemingly trivial village.Adapted from the South Korean romantic drama, 'A Millionaire's First Love'.

Yusuf is released from prison after serving a ten year sentence. Because of unexpected problems at his sister’s house, he finds himself in a cheap hotel where he meets a man, a woman, and a child who will change his life in unexpected ways…

Chen Sheng goes off in search of his nephew who has been abandoned by his father. Along the way, he encounters numerous people from his past and also those from his future.

Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories fill the gaps between camcorder footages as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the troubled man she didn't.

Margherita, a director in the middle of an existential crisis, has to deal with the inevitable and still unacceptable loss of her mother.

Avinash, a dejected soul stuck in a dead-end job shares a strange relationship with his father. He holds him responsible for crushing his dreams. However, he is left pondering upon this longstanding hatred when he hears of his father’s untimely demise.

