About About Dry Grasses
A burned-out art teacher serving out his mandatory rural posting in the snowbound Anatolian steppe is accused of inappropriate behavior by a student. Nuri Bilge Ceylan stretches the situation across more than three hours of debates, dinners, and one extraordinary scene in which an actor walks off the set into the production crew and back again.
Released in 2023 and running a tight 3h 17m, About Dry Grasses sits firmly in the drama tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated NR and presented in Turkish, with English subtitles at participating venues.
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Nuri Bilge Ceylan belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. About Dry Grasses is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Nuri Bilge Ceylan currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — Deniz Celiloğlu, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch About Dry Grasses
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Brooklyn, NY — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Omaha, NE — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Caro, MI — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Rensselaer, IN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Chapel Hill, NC — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Saint Louis Park, MN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Bluffton, OH — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Maynard, MA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Greenwood Village, CO — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Carlsbad, NM — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Minneapolis, MN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Seattle, WA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. About Dry Grasses is a clean fit for that model: a 3h 17m drama work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Drama genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.