Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan visited Armenia on the sidelines of Golden Apricot 8th international film festival. Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia was presented to Armenian viewers in festival framework.

The film portrays a life in a small town, akin to a journey in the steppes in a sense that one anticipates "something new and different" appearing behind the hill, but there are always unerringly similar, tapering, vanishing or lingering monotonous roads...

In Yerevan, the Turkish filmmaker was much impressed by Parajanov museum.

Ceylan named Russian writer Anton Chekhov among the people he learnt from and spoke with high appreciation of Turkish cinema and film professionals.

Turkish photographer and film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan was born in 1959 in Istanbul, Turkey. Ceylan learned photography at age 15, and developed an interest in film at 22. After graduating from the university with a BSc degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, he went on with his studies on cinema for two years at Mimar Sinan University. Ceylan's first short film Cocoon was screened in the 1995 Cannes IFF. He received many awards with his debut feature Small Town. His third feature Distant also received many awards including the Grand Jury Prize and the Best Actor Prize at Cannes, and was praised internationally. Ceylan makes films on an extremely low budget.