New Cinema in Turkey: Filmmakers and Identities between Urban and Rural Space 1443812722, 9781443812726

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

New Cinema in Turkey

New Cinema in Turkey: Filmmakers and Identities between Urban and Rural Space By

Giovanni Ottone

New Cinema in Turkey: Filmmakers and Identities between Urban and Rural Space By Giovanni Ottone This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Giovanni Ottone All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1272-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1272-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Preface ........................................................................................................ ix List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 New Cinema in Turkey: Historical and Political Context Chapter One ................................................................................................. 9 Features of the New Auteur Cinema Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 13 Visions and Styles in Comparison: The Nuri Bilge Ceylan Generation Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 51 A New Generation of Filmmakers Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 75 The Political Cinema Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 87 The Kurdish Issue in Turkish Cinema Conclusion ............................................................................................... 101 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 105 Index ........................................................................................................ 107

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to Atilla Dorsay, whose work and whose friendship have been significant sources of inspiration for the present study. Thanks are also due to Alex Ramon for his help with proofreading and comments on the text, and to Elena Tommaselli, for her translation work.

PREFACE

From the mid-1990s, Turkish cinema has seen a notable growth in confidence and in international recognition. New generations of independent filmmakers, who share a cinematographic ethos – despite the absence of common programmatic or aesthetic manifestos – have emerged. This is a personal cinema, which, with a wide variety of styles and approaches to storytelling, addresses issues of identity in a country that is in a crucial phase of its history, both in social and political terms. The study focuses on this new cinema which can be considered one of the richest and most interesting in the world. Focusing in particular on the films’ exploration of urban and rural spaces, a critical assessment of the last twenty years of the "New Turkish Auteur Cinema" is made by comparing the work of the so-called “third generation” of directors born in the early 1960s who individually can boast an impressive filmography (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Yeúim Ustao÷lu, Zeki Demirkubuz, Derviú Zaim, Semih Kaplano÷lu, Reha Erdem, Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu and others), to a fourth generation of directors, born in the 1970s and 1980s, who, in the great majority, made their debuts in the last decade (Özcan Alper, Seyfi Teoman, Pelin Esmer, Emin Alper, Seren Yüce, Ali Aydin, Mahmut Fazil Coúkun, Sedat Yilmaz, Kazim Öz, Onur Ünlü, Asli Özge, Hüseyin Karabey and others).

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1: Mayis Sikintisi (Clouds of May) (1999), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan ................................................................................. 14 Figure 2.2: Uzak (Distant) (2002), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan ......................... 15 Figure 2.3: Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys) (2008), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan ................................................................................. 17 Figure 2.4: Bir zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) (2011), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan .................................................................... 18 Figure 2.5: Kú Uykusu (Winter Sleep) (2014), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan ....... 20 Figure 2.6: Yumurta (Egg) (2007), by Semih Kaplano÷lu......................... 26 Figure 2.7: Bal (Honey) (2009), by Semih Kaplano÷lu ............................. 28 Figure 2.8: Set photo from Elephants and Grass (2000), by Dervis Zaim .......................................................................................... 30 Figure 2.9: Beú vakit (Times and Winds) (2006), by Reha Erdem ............. 34 Figure 2.10: Jin (2013), by Reha Erdem ................................................... 36 Figure 2.11: Saç (Hair) (2010), by Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu .......................... 42 Figure 2.12: Ben o de÷ilim (I’m Not Him) (2013), by Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu ............................................................................. 44 Figure 3.1:Tepenin ardi (Beyond the Hill) (2012), by Emin Alper ........... 53 Figure 3.2: Köprüdekiler (Men on the Bridge) (2009), by Asli Özge........ 60 Figure 3.3: Ço÷unluk (Majority) (2010), by SerenYüze............................ 64

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List of Illustrations

Figure 4.1: Sonbahar (Autumn) (2008), by Özcan Alper .......................... 78 Figure 4.2: Gelezek uzun sürer (Future Lasts Forever) (2011), by Özcan Alper .......................................................................................... 80 Figure 4.3: Aúk ve devrim (Love and Revolution) (2011), by F. Serkan Acar ...................................................................................... 82 Figure 5.1: Bahoz / Firtina (The Storm) (2008), by Kazim Öz ................. 88 Figure 5.2: Press (2010), by Sedat Yilmaz ................................................ 91 Figure 5.3: Iki dil bir bavul (On the Way to School) (2008) by Orhan Eskiköy and Zeynel Do÷an ........................................................ 92 Figure 5.4: Babamin sesi (Voice of my Father) (2012), by Orhan Eskiköy and Zeynel Do÷an ........................................................ 93 Figure 5.5: Sesime gel (Come to My Voice) (2014), by Hüseyin Karabey .................................................................................. 97

INTRODUCTION NEW CINEMA IN TURKEY: HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT

Turkish cinema has a long history. Its centenary happened in 2014 and it is estimated that, from 1914 to date, about 6,300 feature films have been produced. Moreover, from the statistics it appears that 4,425 of these films were made between 1960 and 1986, the so-called “golden age” of Turkish cinema. Particularly significant in this context is the “Yeúilçam system”: this refers to the period of strong economic growth and massive urbanization that took place between 1965 and 1975 in Turkey. Yeúilçam is the name of a short street in Istanbul, located in the central district of Péra/Beyoglu, where a large number of production companies and movie theatres were established. Many genre films, including dramas, melodramas, and comedies, were also filmed in these locations. During this period, an average of 200 to 300 films a year was made, and a significant “star system” developed, supported by a mass audience. After the military coup of 12 September 1980, which brought a tragic end to a phase of acute political polarization, a forced de-politicization was determined in Turkish society. This corresponded to a progressive crisis in quality and film production, reducing the annual average to a mere 20 features. However, from the mid-1990s - a time of increasing economic liberalization and development of globalization processes - a significant resurgence in Turkish cinema occurred. This regeneration has been demonstrated in the critical and commercial success that Turkish film has experienced over the last decade. For example, since 2005 there has been a progressive growth of the total audience in the theatres with up to around 61 million admissions registered in 2014 and more than 60 million admissions registered in 2015 (in a country of about 77 million inhabitants). Moreover, from 2009, an average annual production of more than 80 national feature films has been reported (from 69 in 2009 to 86 in 2013, 106 in 2014 and 136 in 2015) and a market share of exclusive audience for national films that ranged, over the past decade, between 40%

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Introduction

to 60% (51% in 2009, 58% in 2014 and 57% in 2015). This revival of national cinema is linked to two phenomena that, over time, have revealed themselves to be connected. The first is the revival of popular genre cinema (melodramas, thrillers, historical dramas, comedies) which has updated themes, styles and methods borrowed from the past, achieving significant box office success: dozens of films that individually exceeded 1.5 or 2 million viewers. The second factor in the resurgence is the emergence of independent filmmakers who have reintroduced auteur cinema and made quality films with limited budgets. These filmmakers who wanted to experiment with new visions and aesthetics have reworked, in “self-reflective” terms, existential and cultural themes and have obtained independent financing, also through the support of Festivals, Funds and International Institutions. The present volume focuses on the output of these filmmakers, whose work can be considered as among the richest and most interesting worldwide. The following are directors who in recent years have received awards and prizes from the juries of the most prestigious international festivals: Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Cannes (in three editions of the Festival); Semih Kaplano÷lu in Berlin; Yeúim Ustao÷lu in San Sebastian; Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu in Rome; the debutants Seren Yüce and Ali Aydin and also Emin Alper in the most recent editions of the Venice Film Festival; and the newcomer Mahmut Fazil Coskun in Rotterdam. In addition, Turkish cinema has enjoyed major retrospectives in 2009 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, at the Crossing Europe Film Festival in Linz, and at the Göteborg International Film Festival. The reasons for drawing up a critical assessment of the last twenty years of the “New Turkish Auteur Cinema” are two-fold. Firstly, it is fruitful to compare the so-called third generation, the directors born in the early 1960s, which individually can boast an impressive filmography (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Yeúim Ustao÷lu, Zeki Demirkubuz, Derviú Zaim, Semih Kaplano÷lu, Reha Erdem, Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu, and others), to a fourth generation of directors, born in the 1970s and ’80s, who, in the great majority, made their debuts in the last decade (Özcan Alper, Seyfi Teoman, Pelin Esmer, Özer Kizitan, Emin Alper, Seren Yüce, Ali Aydin, Mahmut Fazil Coúkun, Sedat Yilmaz, Kazim Öz, Onur Ünlü, Asli Özge, Hüseyin Karabey, and others). A second major motivation for this publication is to highlight the fact that Turkish cinema currently runs the risk of political oppression. After the wave of opposition to the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo÷an, leader of the “Justice and Development Party” (Adaletve Lalkinma Partisi – AKP), avowedly Islamic and holding a relative

New Cinema in Turkey: Historical and Political Context

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majority, which started in Istanbul in May 2013 (the so-called revolt in defence of Gezi Park) and then spread to other cities, recently we are witnessing the critical involution of a power system introduced by Erdo÷an in 2002. This Prime Minister has implemented several reforms to liberalize the economy, favouring a turbulent modernization programme and an economic expansion of the country, and from 2002 to 2012 the GDP growth has averaged 5.2% annually. However, he is also a politician with strong populist and authoritarian tendencies, whose policies and patriarchal rhetoric have angered large sections of the population of Istanbul, øzmir and Ankara, from the persistent campaign in favour of an increase in the birth rate to the campaign and law against alcohol consumption. Since June 2013, he has implemented brutal police repression against demonstrators, whom he defines as çapulcu– vandals and terrorists – and has carried out legal proceedings against many independent journalists (the number of reporters held as prisoners, being accused of crimes of opinion, is one of the highest in the world) and fines for radio and television broadcasters. Then, in early 2014, when an investigation emerged about a vast network of corruption and illicit enrichment that involved family members of government ministers and, apparently, members of his own family, Erdo÷an removed hundreds of police officers and magistrates and finally censured and obscured various social networks for allegedly spreading the news of the scandal. Nevertheless, on 10 August 2014, Erdo÷an was elected President of the Republic in the first presidential election by universal suffrage. This firstround victory was certainly not unanimous (52% of the votes), but it undoubtedly marks a strengthening of a leader who pursues ambitious objectives and a project of “majority democracy” centred on his own person. Erdo÷an’s road map to a presidential system and long term monopoly of power came to a dramatic halt when, on June 7, 2015, the parliamentary elections marked a disastrous defeat for the AKP. It lost its parliamentary majority, winning only 41% of the votes. Moreover, the new pro-Kurdish left-wing and moderate “People's Democratic Party” (HDP) easily cleared the 10% threshold and entered Parliament, depriving the governing AKP party of its majority and spoiling plans for a referendum on executive powers for Erdo÷an. The AKP responded first by stalling in coalition negotiations to form a government, and then by restarting the war with the “Kurdistan Workers’ Party” (PKK). On July 20, an “Islamic State” (IS) suicide bomber attacked a group of young leftists and Kurds in Suruç in southeastern Turkey. The bombing killed 33 and injured 104. Then a hardline PKK faction retaliated by murdering two Turkish police officers

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Introduction

whom it accused of collaborating with IS. The government used that killing as the justification to end once and for all the ceasefire with the Kurdish nationalist faction, the Marxist-inspired PKK, launching extensive bombing raids against PKK camps in northern Iraq and detaining thousands of people; these were the most extensive arrests of Kurdish and leftist activists in Turkey since 2011. Kurdish guerrilla insurgency erupted once more and the Turkish Army returned to open the clash. The military and police also launched extensive operations inside Turkish cities in the south-east, laying weeks-long curfews on entire districts, sending in tanks and heavy weapons which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Kurdish civilians. The conflict is also taking a devastating toll on Turkey’s civilians. It is destroying a decade of progress on relations with the Kurdish minority inside Turkey and generating a wave of persecution against media, civil society, and academia. For the AKP’s part, its political argument was that the 7 June election results were leading to chaos, and it used the return to conflict as proof. With no coalition government able to form, new elections were held on 1 November 2015. The AKP’s strategy worked up to a point: it won 49% of the vote this time. But the HDP still cleared the 10% threshold. Thus the AKP had regained its parliamentary majority, but it did not have enough votes to bring a constitutional referendum for a presidential system. All of the opposition parties were completely opposed to this shift. At the same time, dating from spring 2014, violation of human rights, repression of press freedom and freedom of expression and repression against civil society opponents, made by the State apparatuses, had a dramatic crackdown. Prosecutors have opened some 2,000 cases against people suspected of insulting President Erdo÷an since 2014. The newspaper Bugün and the TV stations Bugün and Kanaltürk have been seized by the government. Over 108,000 websites are blocked in Turkey. In the last quarter of 2015 alone, there were 93 cases of supposed insult and violation of personal rights of President Erdo÷an, including against forty-two journalists. In 2015, nineteen journalists and two cartoonists received prison sentences on accusations of insulting Erdo÷an or other high officials. The local monitoring organization Bianet counts at least thirty journalists currently in jail. In February 2016 a bomb attack on a military convoy in the capital Ankara killed at least thirty-eight people. A hard-line breakaway PKK faction - the “Kurdistan Freedom Hawks” (TAK) - claimed responsibility. In March 2016 a suicide carbomb attack in Ankara killed thirty-seven people: TAK again claimed responsibility. Finally, on 15 July 2016, a half-baked coup attempt, organized by a minority faction of military officers, failed. Erdo÷an was away on

New Cinema in Turkey: Historical and Political Context

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holiday, but he managed to condemn what he described as an uprising by “a small group within our armed forces,” and urged the people to defy the curfew by turning out into the streets. During the night, within a few hours, amid reports of fighting, explosions at the Parliament in Ankara, and anti-coup street protests in Istanbul and in other cities, it was plain that the soldiers had failed to swiftly establish control. However, there was bloodshed: at least 200 dead and more than 2,000 injured. By early morning of 16 July, the main state broadcaster, which had aired the coup leaders’ announcement, was back in the hands of the government. With fighting still taking place in Istanbul, Erdo÷an made a triumphant return to the city, appearing on television to announce that those responsible for the coup attempt would pay a “heavy price.” For the President, the failed coup was a golden opportunity to unite a deeply divided society. Practically the entire political class, as well as the overwhelming majority of Turkish citizens, Erdo÷an supporters and opponents alike, spoke out against the coup. Erdo÷an took advantage of this sense of unity by calling for vengeance. He accused the Gülen community, a Muslim sect known as Hizmet (meaning service in Turkish) headed by a cleric, Fethullah Gülen, who had been his erstwhile ally before falling out with him in 2013 and becoming his mortal enemy, of spearheading the coup. Gülen currently lives in self-imposed exile in the United States, residing in Pennsylvania. According to some reports, an estimated 10% of the Turkish population, almost five million, supports Hizmet. The Turkish government had already labelled the Gulenists a terrorist group at the beginning of 2016. On 16 July, the Prime Minister, Binali Yildirim, demanded that the United States government extradite Gulen. The “Alliance for Shared Values,” the US arm of Gülen’s Hizmet movement, was quick to deny any involvement in the coup, insisting that the group did not support the military intervention. Within two weeks after 15 July, the authorities detained 10,000 soldiers and 5,000 army officials, fired 9,000 police officers and suspended 2,745 judges on suspicion of involvement in the coup attempt. As such, the coup provides an opportunity to eliminate what remains of Turkey’s independent judiciary. The purge expanded to include further elements of the Turkish military service, as well as almost 46,000 civil servants, including teachers and University deans, and various private businesses. These later actions affected personnel who were neither active in, nor aware of, the coup as it happened, but who were since alleged to be linked to the coup via connections to the Gülen movement. The government also shut down more than one hundred media outlets, including sixteen TV channels, during a continuing crackdown in the wake of the failed coup. After 15 July, therefore, Erdo÷an can now claim a popular mandate for

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Introduction

amassing even more power and eliminating the remaining centres of opposition. His long-running quest to grant himself even more political power by changing the constitution to create an executive Presidency therefore has a large chance of success. From this political framework comes a substantial danger of a possible boycott by the political power against scriptwriters and independent filmmakers, including the reduction of the public financial support to production and possible barriers to the distribution of films in theatres or bans to minors under eighteen. Erdo÷an, aiming to normalize the society and to promote a model of Turkish grandeur, certainly cannot share the realist and reflective-critical approach and the “hardship of life” that characterises Turkish auteur cinema. At present, New Cinema in Turkey: Filmmakers and Identities Between Urban and Rural Space is the most complete and up-to-date English language book that explores the subject, presenting a full specific examination of all the auteur films of the last two generations of Turkish filmmakers, in the period 1994 – 2014, and exploring themes and issues with a strong relation to the political and social context in contemporary Turkey. It joins a few other books published during the last decade that, in an international context, are investigating Turkish cinema. Years of Collapse and Renaissance of Our Cinema: Turkish Cinema 1990 – 2004 (2004) and Our Cinema Change Winds: Turkish Cinema 2005 – 2010 (2010), both by Atilla Dorsay, the most eminent Turkish film critic, are excellent works providing critical examinations of all the films produced in Turkey during those periods. However, both texts are only published in Turkey and are not translated into English. Turkish Cinema, 1970 - 2007: a Bibliography and Analysis (2008), by Ekkehard Ellinger and Kerem Kayi, published in Germany and also distributed in the USA, is a large critical encyclopedic work that comprises two parts, a bibliography and a study of the history of Turkish cinema and a comprehensive study focusing on various aspects and subjects of Turkish cinema including its beginnings, genres, directors, and producers. Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging (2008), by Gönül Dönmez-Colin, published in the UK,presents a comprehensive analysis of Turkish cinema since the beginning, 100 years ago, interweaving cinematic history, aesthetic analyses, theoretical approaches to identity, and explanations of evershifting political and social contexts. However, it does not take into consideration the last generation of filmmakers, the new films that confront political matters and the Kurdish films of the last decade. Perhaps the closest publication in subject matter is New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory (2010), by Asuman Suner, published in

New Cinema in Turkey: Historical and Political Context

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the UK and also distributed in the USA, which provides a significant examination of contemporary Turkish cinema and explores the emergence of this new wave cinema against the backdrop of the drastic transformation of Turkey since the 1990s, including both commercial and independent production and addressing the divergences between popular and art-house cinema. However, Suner’s book does not focus on the work of the younger generation of filmmakers.

CHAPTER ONE FEATURES OF THE NEW AUTEUR CINEMA

In Turkey the issue of auteur cinema has been historically controversial. In the 1960s and 1970s filmmakers with distinctive personal poetics and styles (for example, Metin Erksan, Atif Yilmaz, Yilmaz Güney, and Ömer Lufti Hakad) have had to accept compromises with the film industry to protect their expression and their careers. Even the few filmmakers (Ömer Kavur, Yavuz Özcan, Erden Kiral) active in the '80s, during the production collapse, have encountered difficulties in developing their own themes and aesthetics. Incidentally, although in those decades many filmmakers were influenced by the French “Nouvelle Vague” or by Italian “Neo-Realism” and by European avant-garde art movements, intellectuals and critics at that time often viewed the claim for an auteur identity with suspicion, criticizing the alleged bourgeois tendencies and the lack of a precise political consciousness. This constituted a further difficulty for the filmmakers who wanted to reflect original perspectives in their work, but had to depend on the requirements and limitations imposed by the industry. Therefore, when in the mid-1990s – at a time of questioning the concept of auteur cinema in many European countries – a new generation of independent filmmakers proved themselves able to produce films with an objectively personal connotation and with very limited budgets (the debuts of Derviú Zaim and Nuri Bilge Ceylan and, years before, Reha Erdem), their auteur status was not immediately and clearly recognized by the majority of Turkish intellectuals. This initial uncertainty, with respect to their positioning in the cultural context, has favoured their expressive freedom and experimental flexibility. Moreover, the directors themselves express different individual approaches and awareness of their work and questioned themselves about the limits and the forms of their filmmaking. In any case we can affirm that, over the last two decades, the new Turkish auteur cinema has shown a constant search for an autonomous space, reflecting and introducing many themes from the social, the political and the cultural spheres. It is a cinema that reflects perspectives that are in a continuous process of clarification, reformulation and

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Chapter One

proposition of new ways of vision, even across ambiguous and unstable territories. Although each film is a distinct project and the connections between the filmmakers cannot be said to constitute a true cultural movement, it is notable that the directors largely share similar aspects and tendencies. These include: the partial or non-attendance at film schools (especially in the case of those of the third generation); an apprenticeship through the production of short films; the constant and decisive reference to their autobiographical experiences, hence the fact that they are very often also scriptwriters for their films; the sharing of a cinematographic ethos related to the use of limited budgets and the direction of the actors; residence in Istanbul where, in recent years, the technical and distribution facilities have increased in favour of independent cinema. In general terms, new Turkish cinema has introduced elements to represent the different facets of the nation’s identity and the power conflicts at various levels, in the domestic, social, religious and political fields. It addresses, in particular, the crucial issues of being Turkish, historically determined and accrued over the last fifty years, and primarily the complexities of life and identity in the metropolis of Istanbul (the most represented urban space), in the province and/or in the countryside and the aspects of this dichotomy. In this regard, it is worth highlighting that the Turkish word taúra, which corresponds to province, assumes a more elusive, but also a more complex, undertone. In fact, it literally means “the outer space” and, during the time of the Ottoman Empire, it indicated the distant lands. Thus arises a broader concept of the “Other” that identifies and includes the countryside, the villages and even the small provincial towns in Anatolia. Finally, taúra alludes to an outer periphery opposed to a centre, a symbol of “Western modernity” or, in more extreme terms, any place outside Istanbul. Historically, in Turkish cinema, the province was often represented as a stifling and limiting space, characterized by primitivism and traditionalism, and a source of sadness and desolation. By contrast, contemporary generations of filmmakers have often considered it to be a place of creative inspiration, and have highlighted its existential contradictions and multi-dimensional features in a complex manner. The same tension between the metropolis and the province has led many filmmakers (such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Seyfi Teoman, Ahmet Uluçay, and Ça÷an Irmak) to reconsider the provincial rural areas of their childhoods through young or adolescent characters, exploring a complicated attachment to the past and the impossibility of a return to it. In other cases (such as Semih Kaplano÷lu, Reha Erdem, Yeúim Ustao÷lu, Özcan Alper, and Belma Bas), the province is represented as a

Features of the New Auteur Cinema

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monotonous and claustrophobic space where the lifestyle is unchangeable and where nature, rich and cruel at the same time, is repeated rhythmically. Conversely, Istanbul is an ill-defined space that can be understood only on a fragmented basis, a space that is represented in a disenchanted and realistic manner (by Zeki Demikubuz and Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu) or as an inhospitable place (by Nuri Bilge Ceylan). New Turkish cinema is a personal cinema with a wide variety of styles and narrative approaches, but, from a thoroughly modern perspective, it expresses a common trait: the visual representation of the unsaid and the undone, thus of the emotions that the deep feeling or the monotony of daily life prevents from being openly expressed. Almost all of the most important films of the last twenty years focus on characters who find it difficult to communicate, who are uncomfortable with words, or who are unable to make other people understand their feelings even when they speak about them. The absence of real conversations is directly related to the inability to express personal troubles in terms of communication. This is the sign of a naturally limited language, but also of sadness and frustration. Furthermore, in many cases, what is unsaid mostly concerns socio-political issues connected to a specific Turkish context: discrimination, prejudice, hidden violence, identity crisis and cultural amnesia. These films show a constant representation of unexpressed feelings, lack of belonging and resistance to the identification with predetermined social codes. Therefore, the attempt to bring to light the disguised dynamics of hegemony and to question what has been accepted as “natural behaviour” is a recurrent feature.

CHAPTER TWO VISIONS AND STYLES IN COMPARISON: THE NURI BILGE CEYLAN GENERATION

The so-called “third generation” of Turkish cinema refers to filmmakers born in the early 1960s, who made their debuts in the mid 1990s. As already mentioned, these filmmakers reintroduced auteur cinema, making quality art-house films with limited budgets. The third generation is composed of individual personalities firmly established through substantial filmographies whose works can also be usefully compared, as this chapter will demonstrate. Also, many of the directors expressed themselves through the choice of a specific path, the trilogy of films, although revealing different purposes in the filmmaking context. The overview begins by analysing the paths of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Zeki Demirkubuz who, despite their very different approaches, share the same concern with the limitations of the cinematic gaze to describe and understand the existential complexity of the individual. Moreover, while Ceylan places his characters, and himself as a director, in a large, but distant, living space, Demirkubuz imprisons his protagonists, in spatial and psychological terms, under an intense duress that is relentless and without any exit. Born in 1959, Nuri Bilge Ceylan studied electrical engineering and later became a photographer with partial and interrupted film studies. He considers cinema to be a tool that allows him to express things that he would not dare to say, and one that enables him to explore the most intimate and dramatic spheres of his personal condition and vision of reality. He directed and produced, almost single-handedly, his first short film, Koza (Cocoon) (1995), casting his parents, Mehmet Emin and Fatma Ceylan. Addressing the difficulties of cohabitation, this film immediately and distinctively establishes Ceylan’s interest in exploring emotional dysfunction and alienation. He followed the short film with his “Provincial Trilogy.” Kasaba (Small Town) (1997), his first feature film, in black and white, of which he is also screenwriter, co-editor, director of photography

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Chapter Two

Figure 2.1:Mayis Sikintisi (Clouds of May) (1999), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

and producer, exhibits a minimalist and poetic approach to the observation of the details of everyday life in the village of Anatolia where his family is living. Divided into four episodes, corresponding to the seasons, the film presents characters and landscapes from the perspective of two young boys, witnesses of the “mysteries” of life and nature. It is vibrant, not lacking in irony, and boasts an extraordinary visual sensibility that favours static shots, slow, long takes and uncut scenes. Mayis Sikintisi (Clouds of May) (1999) returns to the context and setting of the previous film, offering a double vision of the countryside as a site of boredom, misery and frustration yet also a peaceful place that can nourish the soul. The protagonist is Muzaffer (Muzaffer Özdemir), alter ego of Ceylan himself, a forty-year-old director who returns to the village of his elderly parents, Mehmet (Mehmet Emin Ceylan) and Fatma (Fatma Ceylan), to make a film about them. The film is a self-reflexive exploration of the continuous and vain effort to describe the “essence” of life in the countryside, with its rituals, obsessions, desires and worries. Moreover, the presence of the sound equipment and of the camera highlights the distance and the dichotomy between the protagonist’s present condition as a city-dweller and his past in the family home. Shot in black and white, it’s an extraordinary film which focuses on the slow passing of time, on the observations of nature and on the interaction of the characters, all the while enhancing the importance of apparently insignificant objects. Throughout, Clouds of May offers a deliberate incompleteness to show the viewer the failure to achieve the objective of truth. Both the film’s humour

Visions and Styles in Comparison: The Nuri Bilge Ceylan Generation

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and its melancholy stem from the way in which it highlights the ultimate superficiality of any attempt to capture the reality and the complexity of ordinary life through cinema.

Figure 2.2: Uzak (Distant) (2002), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Uzak (Distant) (2002) takes place in Istanbul and privileges desolate, misty and rainy autumn atmospheres. Again it explores the rural / urban divide by staging the impossible encounter of two taciturn and contrasting individuals. Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) is a forty-year-old photographer in professional crisis, oppressed by melancholy and by the obsessive routine of a lonely life of straitened circumstances. Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) is his younger cousin, who suddenly arrives from the countryside to look for work as a port labourer. He is someone who reminds the photographer of the rural background from which he, Mahmut, now feels “distant” and who forces him to consider the individualistic aridity of his present existence. Trapped in the vain search for a job and in the inability to solve an ancient emotional bond, the two share both Mahmut’s old apartment and an intense feeling of failure, unable to communicate in any way. Their distance is developed through different levels of moral conflicts. The taste for the detailed observation of behaviours, spiked with subtle humour, frees the director from the temptation of resorting to the predictable or the hackneyed, allowing him to find the way to a tangible authenticity. The film is an intense reflection on loneliness and the impossibility of escape and offers a pessimistic view of the Turkish male. Echoes of Tarkovsky’s and Ozu’s works are evident. The sharp

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photography has a stark contrast with the sordid nature of the depicted environments. With øklimler (Climates) (2006), Ceylan takes another step in his path of bitter self-reflection. Once again, he presents the inability to support an affective and emotional attachment, telling the story of a couple that faces a crisis due to the end of the relationship, and tries in vain to reassemble it. Isa (Ceylan himself) is a forty-year-old university assistant, while his younger partner Bahar (the director's wife, Ebru Ceylan) is a production assistant in a television company. They live in Istanbul, but the film opens with images of their solitary summer holiday on a magnificent sandy beach of the Mediterranean coast. From that moment, in which one clearly perceives the gap separating the couple, Ceylan articulates the narration in three moments, climatic and existential seasons, which make up the story. The lack of communication between the couple clearly connects to the inexorable and slow temporal succession. Summer realizes the separation; autumn is the time of independent living and of the vain search for an escape from frustration and desolation, while winter shows the attempt to recompose the fracture. Ceylan confirms his brutal honesty in dealing with the theme of the male/female relationship, with an avoidance of any obvious psychological explanations. He represents with merciless bitterness, and occasional irony, the superficiality and the fake intellectualism of the character he plays. The film shows an exceptional quality through its quiet, clear and intense visual and narrative style. Dialogues are scarce, terse and raw, indicating the existential wear and tear of the characters. The universe defined by the shots, meticulous in details, is not cold and narcissistic, but rather expresses an exceptional photographic definition that makes the viewer feel the physical sensations condensed into images. The long shots and the extended sequence shots define alienating landscapes and capture the empty disenchantment of the characters that also show flashes of vitality, sometimes feral, but to no avail. The soundtrack is essentially composed by ordinary noises, but extremely present and precise, with the aim to amplify the effect of the images. In Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys) (2008) Ceylan expands his horizon, moving from the focus on a small group of relatives and colleagues, and also on himself, to the close observation of the destinies of other, diverse characters. This film is a melodrama-noir, the result of a measured and controlled presentation, which challenges the canon of genres. It is a bitter apologue about the moral decay of a society gradually stifled by avarice and weakness. As is clear from the title, the story aspires to the status of a parable, based specifically on the well-known Asian legend of the three

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Figure 2.3: Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys)(2008), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

monkeys: one does not see, the second does not speak and the third refuses to hear. Therefore, the film strives to show the escape of people from responsibilities and from sorrows which are too hard to bear, and the negative consequences that are the result. The story begins with a car accident in which a fifty-year-old politician hits and kills a pedestrian in the middle of the road. Servet (Erkan Kesal) convinces his driver Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl), absent at the time of the accident, to assume the responsibility and to serve the prison sentence, offering in exchange a substantial financial aid to his family. This agreement triggers a chain of consequences, according to a morbid psychological game that echoes Dostoevsky, between betrayal and passion, ambition, distorted loyalty and suppressed anger. The politician and Hacer (Hatice Aslan), the driver’s wife, begin a sexual relationship. Ismail (Ahmet Rifat ùungar), the woman’s teenage son, discovers his mother’s adultery, but he is unable to tell the fact to his father when he visits him in prison. In the film, all the characters are somehow corrupt, guilty and involved in a complex web of lies and subterfuges. The dramatic irony of the story is surrounded by an overall atmosphere of torpor not lacking in symbolism. Ceylan reproposes his aesthetics, emphasizing again the observation of nature and the passing of time. He chooses a very careful, and often maddeningly slow, composition of the images. Thus, he introduces a very suggestive “realism” characterized by static shots with motionless camera, long sequence shots, a pivotal role of glances and silences and a dark and sepiatoned photography.

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Figure 2.4: Bir zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) (2011), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Bir zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) (2011) focuses on characters who are much more developed. Their interaction is functional to a specific desire of the director to tell a story alongside many smaller stories. In addition this film is a parable about humanity, although less bitter, not because falsely optimistic, but because more explicitly vital. At the same time Ceylan proves to be uninterested in any attempt to mythologise his country or its people. It is a drama which plays with crime thriller and road movie conventions. However, it looks very atypical if compared to those genres, because it rejects their schemes and their conventional articulation of events. The plot is apparently very simple. It follows the course of a judicial inquiry supported by the police, with a site inspection, which lasts from dusk to noon of the next day. Moreover, what should be a routine situation becomes, in the film, a subtle game of chess that, as the events will focus, provides a broader picture of the people, involved in the action or encountered, and of the places. A small caravan of cars goes along peripheral roads in the countryside, among barren hills and fields of ripe wheat, on the outskirts of a small provincial town in Anatolia. Some police officers, a judge and a forensic doctor accompany a man, a self-confessed murderer, in search of the place where he buried the remains of the victim, after killing him during a fight. The group goes from place to place because it is obvious that the murderer is unable to remember the exact place where the body is buried. The itinerant investigation proceeds slowly

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and drags on, recording speeches and actions of the often garrulous individuals. At some point during the night, they go to a farmstead and eat a light meal offered by the farmers. During the break, the dialogues of the inhabitants, talking about their personal problems, social issues and customs of the region, are interwoven with those of the group conducting the investigation. Then at noon, after a night spent on patrol, the group comes back to town and sends the accused back to prison, to the curiosity and comments of onlookers. The investigation was apparently inconclusive, and yet in reality many details and stories have emerged. The result is a more general portrait of life in this region of Anatolia. The director does not hide his pleasure in placing the characters in a specific space and allowing us to observe them. He highlights their little quirks, the opinions expressed, and the forms of their interaction, among moments of frustration, discomfort, pain, or even when they are exchanging ironic jokes. After all, the characters express their relief to be able to communicate their ideas and to tell of old experiences, positive or painful. The viewer is faced with an interesting maze of events and emotions. Ceylan reviews, with many open questions, a range of interconnected issues: the concerns and behaviours of those who live in the province; the relation with the place where one lives; the balance between ethics and pragmatism; the need to cling to small trivial things of life when you are faced with misfortunes, losses, wrongs or absurdities. What emerges is an honest, sharp and sometimes biting perspective, pointing to the essence, not only tangible, of human life. More than that, the film shows an ability to tell it outright, without judging. Awarded the Palme d'Or for best film at the Cannes Festival, Ceylan’s most recent film, Kú Uykusu (Winter Sleep) (2014), is a magnificent fresco of human relations, but also a multi-layered and brave examination of the contradictions in Turkish society today. The story takes place in wintertime in a small boutique hotel in Anatolia, in the touristic region of Cappadocia. Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), the fifty-year-old owner, is an intellectual, a former stage actor in Istanbul, as well as a columnist for the local newspaper. His much younger wife, Nihal (Melisa Sozen), is visibly frustrated and devotes herself to funding local primary schools. Necla (Demet Akbag), Aydin’s sister, is a mature woman, embittered due to a recent divorce. There gradually emerges a serious conflict between the protagonist and a poor family of tenants of his, living in another building, who haven’t paid their rent for months. Aydin is an anguished “thinker” who likes to debate with his sister on the topics of his articles: morality, conscience, or the behaviour of Muslim clerics. On the other hand, he is

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unable to deal with the poorest people because he stigmatises their “roughness”, as he perceives it. Thus, he delegates the management of his

Figure 2.5: Kú Uykusu (Winter Sleep) (2014), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

properties, and of the related quarrels, to his factotum, the faithful and pragmatic Hidayet (Ayberk Pekan). Necla debates with Nihal the best course of action to deal with a violent act. Aydin and Nihal argue because

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she cannot endure the paternalism and the arrogant misanthropy of her husband, while he criticizes her naivety. It emerges that the marriage has been in crisis for some time, with mutual suffering. The characters live with discomfort because they are oppressed by old and new contradictions and because they misinterpret their social position. Feelings and values clash and become complex without any possible mediation or synthesis. The film is entirely characterized by long dialogues, often of literary quality, but exciting, with occasional hints of humour. These conversations, which mostly take place indoors, demonstrate Ceylan’s screenwriting skill that goes beyond the story to focus on real issues about life and living together, without judgment. Moreover they show a wonderful interpretative actors’ game. Visually, the film is a fascinating art work. It offers a masterful composition of images: static shots with a skilful shot-countershot within closed doors, uncut scenes and occasional widescreen panning shots of the landscape with great depth of field, alongside an exceptional dark-toned photography, developed by Gökhan Tiryaki. Ceylan declared he was inspired by some of Chekhov's short stories, but he also admitted autobiographical elements. He denied precise implications in the contemporary political situation in Turkey, even though there are some obvious references. Rather, he specified that he wanted to represent human nature, to touch the soul of the viewer. Imprisoned in 1980, during the period of the military coup, when he was charged with communist activism, Zeki Demirkubuz (1964) is a proudly independent filmmaker, and owner of his own production company. He is a director who does not hide his scepticism about the social order, and also about his professional role. Starting from the assumption that he considers life as a hopeless search for truth, the cinema becomes his medium to realize this futile and unsuccessful pursuit. This is reflected in a visual style that is simple and often deliberately inelegant. His protagonists roam the screen always haunted by inner ghosts and plunged into a selfish spiral in the face of the harshness of life. They cling to fatal surrogates (obsessions, jealousy, attempts at social integration) that are persistent and become the engine and the inevitable cause of their behaviours and their existence. In addition, their point of view affects the whole narrative of the stories. Demirkubuz presents the anguish of these protagonists without either contempt or compassion. He debuted with C Blok (Block C) (1994), a flawed drama that describes in detail the existence of a depressed woman living in a large tenement on the outskirts of Istanbul. However, his next film Masumieyet (Innocence) (1997) is widely considered a masterpiece that has influenced many filmmakers who emerged at the turn of the third millennium. It is a film that redefines

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the genre of melodrama in Turkish cinema, denying any cathartic possibility. Set in squalid and decadent places (anonymous and forgotten towns, destroyed hotels and dark bars), it tells the intense story of three outcasts, prisoners of their obsessive love. The first is a prostitute, the second is her procurer-pimp, while the third is a naive young man who is trapped in the tragic triangle. The misery of their lives becomes more acute because they cling desperately to the things that they have never had. Üçüncü sayfa (The Third Page) (1999) is a complex and fascinating work that blends existential drama, thriller and a critique of cinema and television. It describes the downfall of Isa (Ruhi Sari), a young man who lives in a decaying apartment building in Istanbul and who gets by working as a background actor in several television series. Isa is a person driven by uncontrollable instincts that lead him to act against his own interests, although he attempts, in vain, to control his fate. Accused of theft and hunted by the henchmen of a Mafioso creditor, he attempts suicide. But, instead, he kills his landlord, who had threatened him with immediate eviction for non-payment. When questioned by the police, he does not confess the crime. Then Meyrem (Baúak Kölükaya), a housekeeper and neighbour repays his debt. But the encounter with this mysterious and nefarious femme fatale will drive him to ruin. Afterwards, Demirkubuz made the trilogy “Tales about Darkness” which offers a meaningful analysis of the existential contradictions of characters who struggle in despair, loneliness, extreme passions and guilt. Itíraf (Confession) (2001) describes a desperate jealousy. We witness a long night of painful confrontation between Harun (Taner Birsel), a respected engineer, and Niljun (Baúak Kölükaya), the charming wife who betrayed him and wants to leave. The film constructs a world of absurdly symmetrical and dramatically involved feelings, confessions and regrets, but no physical violence, because they are simple surrogates of apathy. Yazgi (Fate) (2001) is a free adaptation of the novel L’Étranger by Albert Camus. It tells the story of a man who is totally indifferent to the world and people around him. Musa (Serdar Orçin) is a frustrated young man who works at a customs office. He gets married with a woman he does not love and, at the peak of a process of alienation and self-denial, he is arrested for a murder which he did not commit. Beklemeodasi (The Waiting Room) (2003) offers the portrait of a director (Demirkubuz himself) that attempts to adapt Fëdor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Through the failure of all the protagonists of the story, Demirkubuz appears to reflect his own failure in the search for truth, honesty and an understanding of the differences between good and evil.

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Kader (Destiny) (2006) is a prequel to the aforementioned Masumieyet (Innocence). It is a wonderful melodrama without climax and catharsis. It describes a love triangle among passion, obsession and damnation. The twenty-year-old Bekir (Ufuk Bayraktar) falls in love with the young U÷ur (Vildan Atasever), after she comes, almost by chance, to the carpet shop where he works. This woman is a singer who performs in bars, as well as the lover of Zagor (Ozan Bilen), an incarcerated, mentally unstable killer. She follows his transfers from one prison to another. Bekir is obsessed with the dream of having U÷ur. He looks at her, and dreams about her, as an ambiguous presence, angelic and devilish at the same time, in an intriguing game between lucidity and madness. Thus, he chases her from one anonymous city to another, impoverishing and destroying his own marriage. In this completely atypical road movie, the characters’ minds are withdrawn and their utopian existential paths create spirals of inconsolable grief and misery, leading them to self-destruction. Kiskanmak (Envy) (2009) takes place in the 1930s in Zonguldak, a town on the Black Sea coast. It tells a story of envy between two women: Seniha, the unattractive and submissive sister of Halit, the engineer of the mine, and the beautiful Mükerrem, Halit’s wife. When Mükerrem returns the courtship of Nüshet, the son of the richest man in that neighbourhood, Sehina becomes the evil arbiter of her sister-in-law’s fate. Made with a considerable budget, the film is an impressive study of emotions and their implications. Yeralti (Inside) (2012) is inspired by Dostoevsky’s novel Notes from Underground, and by the writings of Nietzsche and Camus. The film offers a grotesque and desperate portrait of a forty-year-old employee in Ankara. Muharrem (Engin Günaydin) is unable to relate to others, even to friends, without showing bitterness and without exaggerating the recriminations of his past. Through close-ups and interior shots, Demirkubuz builds an intriguing claustrophobic atmosphere, with ironic and hallucinatory hints, showing the gradual fall of the character into a self-destructive vortex of frustration. Demirkubuz’s latest film, Kor (Ember) (2016), is a claustrophobic melodrama-noir. It is a close observation of a love triangle between a woman and two men. Demirkubuz confirms his pessimism regarding human attitudes and behaviours, but offers an anthropological and social portrait which is very well balanced and controlled. Compared to his previous films, in this new work there is more compassion towards the protagonists, who are trapped in an aimless desire and quest for happiness, between anguish and lies. At the same time the film shows, without degenerating into didacticism or banal psychology, the moral decay of a society stifled by avarice, weakness, obsessions, jealousy and attempts at

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social integration. At the centre of the plot is Emine (Aslihan Gürbüz), an attractive thirty-year-old woman and expert seamstress. When she gets the news that her husband Cemal (Caner Cindoruk) is arrested in Romania, where he went in search of work, Emine is left alone with their sick child who needs urgent surgery. She takes on hand-stitching work at a garment workshop, where she runs into Ziya (Taner Birsel), her husband's former boss, a pragmatic and confident fifty-year-old. Ziya is affected when he learns what Ermine is going through. Given his one-time feelings towards Emine, who ultimately chose to marry Cemal, he can’t pretend to be indifferent to her plight, and so he takes on payment of the child’s surgery. Then, despite being married himself, Ziya starts a relationship with her. But this is very controversial. Ermine sleeps with Ziya, but it is not clear if she is motivated by a feeling of attraction towards him or merely by gratitude. On the other hand, Ziya promises to leave his wife, but he doesn’t take any moves to accomplish this. When Cemal returns home months later, he finds Emine working at the garment workshop and their son healthy. But the astronomical hospital bill he stumbles across by chance leads him to discover that Ziya paid for the child’s operation and Emine hid this fact. Cemal, who in the past already blames Ziya for his own unachieved goals at work, is extremely jealous of Emine, and can neither confront the situation nor choose to ignore it. Demirkubuz declared that human nature include a mix of rationality and irrationality, morals and desires, reasons and randomness: the roots of goodness and malice. In this film he confirms his fatalistic view of human nature with which one has to live helplessly, without being able to do anything about it. In fact it looks like that the deepest pain a person suffers is hidden in his nature which is impossible to grasp. But, also, in a certain way, the film recalls Asghar Farhadi’s cinema in its focus on the obligations, conventions and conformism of a society dominated by lies and dubious morals. In this atypical and multi-layered psychological thriller, narrative is fluid and the direction of the actors is very effective. Semih Kaplano÷lu (1963) studied cinema at the Faculty of Fine Arts in øzmir, the city where he was born. Like Ceylan, his work is particularly concerned with the concepts of home, family and belonging. On the other hand, he differs from the latter because his idea of cinema focuses primarily on the problematic psychology of the characters, trapped by traditions and family obligations and oppressed by the cruel rules of capitalist modernization. His approach is never explicit nor prosaic, but poetic and regretful. His films highlight the issue of time and the connections between culture, traditions, faith and dreams. Thus, he introduces specific visual aesthetics that are lyrical, intense and refined,

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and, over the years, increasingly harmonious and less formalist. In his debut film Herkes kendi evinde (Away From Home) (2001) there is precisely the idea of the quest for “hearth and home”, in a society that tends to destroy the traditional forms of family, forcing individuals to live in anonymous apartment blocks. At the centre of the story, set in Istanbul, there are three characters: the twenty-year-old Selim (Tolga Çevik); his uncle, the sixty-year-old Nasuhi (Erol Keskin); Olga (Anna Bielska), a young Russian woman forced into prostitution, who came to Istanbul to search for her father, missing for years. The young man, deeply affected by the loss of his parents years before, has finally decided to emigrate to the United States and to live in New York, leaving his girlfriend and breaking all ties with Turkey. In contrast, his uncle, who is back to his homeland after years spent in Russia, wants to connect with Turkey’s ancient customs and traditions once again. He is animated by feelings of moral integrity that lead him to help Olga. The three characters travel to visit the country house and the olive tree grove that Selim wants to sell to finance his travel abroad, which the enthusiastic Nasuhi would like to take care of. Kaplano÷lu’s next film, Mele÷in düúüúü (Angel’s Fall) (2005), is a minimalist realist drama which captures the audience through a progressive tension, to the limits of endurance. The director tells the story of a young woman, Zeynep (Tülin Özen), aged 19, who works as a waitress in a small hotel. She is alienated, introverted and wrapped in despair. The girl rejects with hostility any approach by male characters because she is dominated by a great shame. It emerges that she lives in a squalid proletarian apartment where she cooks for her coarse father who commits repeated sexual abuses against her. Finally, Zeynep kills her father, cuts up his body, carries the pieces in a suitcase (a key object in a parallel story involving another male character) and throws them into the Bosporus. This film is artfully constructed, with an almost mystical atmosphere, minimal lighting, and a reliance upon long sequence shots. Its slow dynamics are contained in the expression of the faces and in the gestures of the actors who are non-professionals. The narrative style is unstructured and non-linear, the action and the dialogues are minimized and the music is almost non-existent. Subsequently, Kaplano÷lu made the “Yusuf Trilogy” which explores, in reverse chronology, three phases in the life of a single character: midlife, youth and childhood. Set in different rural regions of Anatolia, the cycle shows the contrast between tradition and impending modernization. The films are all set in contemporary times, but include a lengthy “flashback” in the life of the main character, which was marked by the

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early loss of his father. The three stories have titles that correspond to three different natural foods: honey, symbolizing the father, is diluted in milk, symbol of the mother, and the two together create the egg, from whose broken shell the individual-artist is born. In this way, Kaplano÷lu effectively blends and harmonizes the ordinary and the symbolic, the quotidian and the spiritual.

Figure 2.6: Yumurta (Egg) (2007), by Semih Kaplano÷lu

Yumurta (Egg) (2007) is an atypical road movie. It creates a complex existential portrait on the background of a country where conflicting social and cultural realities coexist. The protagonist, Yusuf (Nejat øúler), is a fifty-year-old poet, an introvert and indecisive bachelor who has long been established in Istanbul. On the death of his mother, he is forced to return to Tire, his native village located in a rural area, from which he has been absent for many years. He soon finds himself immersed in memories and ghosts of the past and in the slow pace of local life, between peace and alienation. Meanwhile he meets Ayla (Saadet Aksoy), his young cousin who took care of his mother over the past five years. Ayla informs him that, before her death, his mother was unable to carry out a religious rite of sacrifice which was important to her. Therefore, she asks him to visit the grave of a Muslim cleric, considered holy, to perform that rite there. Yusuf, who is an atheist, is perplexed. However, he sets off with Ayla and, during the trip, a strong emotional involvement arises between them. Thus, the ending of the film is open. It is a dry film, rich in atmosphere, with the merit of representing a relationship in terms of progressive mutual

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discovery, without unnecessary psychological explanations. Dialogue is minimal and emotional tension is built through looks and gestures. The visual universe, defined by meticulously detailed shots, by sequence shots of the landscape and by intense static shots of the protagonists, makes the viewer feel the physical sensations condensed into the images. Süt (Milk) (2008), also set in Tire, shows the changes that have occurred as a result of the economic development of the region and the consequences on the life of the protagonists. It focuses on a mother-child relationship and it highlights its crisis. Yusuf (Melih Selçuk) is a sensitive and vulnerable young man, generally hostile to change. A high school graduate and amateur poet, he continues to help Zehra (Baúak Köklükaya), his widowed mother who runs a small milk-selling business. The woman, until then completely dedicated to her son, begins an affair with the village stationmaster. This relationship disturbs Yusuf, who is also uncertain about his own sexual preferences. He is then declared unfit for military service due to the repercussions of a childhood disease; this causes shame and an anxiety to prove his masculinity. A central aspect of traditional culture emerges in the film: the mother figure symbolizes the concepts of land and nation and is associated with the values of honour and family morality. In the same tradition, the child is still dependent on the mother, who nourished him with her milk and protected him, and therefore he psychologically struggles to undertake the transition to adulthood. Kaplano÷lu shows gestures and details of a mother-son relationship which is again expressed through minimal dialogue: an attachment that changes over the time, in an atmosphere of suppressed pain. For this purpose, he chooses a style that is not explicit, with meaningful images and metaphors, and enhances the unfathomable connection between people and landscape through skilful editing. Bal (Honey) (2009), awarded with the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlinale, is a family drama with a tragic ending. The story is set in the northeastern province of Rize, in a mountainous, densely forested region. Again the protagonist is Yusuf (Bora Altaú), who is here presented as a 6year-old boy who lives with his parents in a log house, spacious and austere, halfway up in the woods. Every day he goes on a long walk through the forest to reach his primary school, where he learns to read and write. His father Yakup (Erdal Beúikçio÷lu) is a beekeeper, serious and taciturn, who ventures into the forest placing the hives, where the bees deposit the honey, on the treetops. His job is very dangerous, carried out by lifting himself up on very tall trees, hanging from handmade ropes hurled around the higher branches, after ensuring they can maintain the grip. Yusuf’s mother, Zehra (Tülin Özen), works in a tea plantation and

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Figure 2.7: Bal (Honey) (2009), by Semih Kaplano÷lu

is a silent and discreet presence. Yusuf, who struggles at school because he is ashamed of his stuttering, maintains a strong relationship, of love and respect, with his father. When he accompanies Yakup, following him in his footsteps on the mountain trails, he proves to be confident and feels strongly attracted to nature and its phenomena. For him, the forest is a magical and mysterious place to discover, with the help of his expert parent. They whisper to each other and the child learns to recognize the times and the places, the calls of different bird families, the names and fragrances of different types of flowers and the sounds. One day Yakup sets out for a different and distant destination, in search of the famous Caucasian bees that have suddenly disappeared from the area adjacent to their village. Time goes by and Yakup does not reappear. His fate is unknown, although some previous images showed him hanging in mid-air, in precarious conditions, after losing his grip. Yusuf withdraws into himself and stops talking. Zehra emerges from the background in which she was confined and begins to seek information from acquaintances and other beekeepers. Mother and son are restless and oppressed by their suffering. Yusuf goes to his grandmother's house and spends the night before the anniversary of Mohammed’s ascension to Heaven, believing that also his father, as happened in the case of the Prophet, will return home. Therefore, with a translation of place and time, we are witnessing

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the fatal fall of Yakup that caused his death, which actually happened several days before. His body will finally be found and his wife and son will face with dignity the immense pain, aware that their life has undergone a crucial turning point. The film moves slowly, developing a minimalist plot, successfully complicated by inventive editing, with different time insertions. Kaplano÷lu favours the calm observation of his characters, documenting also, with great sensitivity, their relationship with nature. The result is the representation of a “slice of life” that captures the viewer emotionally with the power of images, of looks and gestures, carefully avoiding any forced overacting. The film is full of nuances and is characterized by an exceptional stylistic quality. The cameraman and director of photography Bariú Özbiçer alternate intense close-ups and still shots with an effective use of depth of field. There is an effective play of light and shade throughout which enhances the differentiation of the colours of the earth and the vegetation in relation to the different climatic conditions, from sun to rain and fog. Music is rigorously absent, while the noises and the natural sounds are enhanced. We now turn to the filmographies of two directors who address, albeit via different working methods and styles, issues pertinent to contemporary Turkey while also alluding to the country’s historical past and the memory of older traditions and conflicts: Derviú Zaim and Reha Erdem. While the former pays attention to the social and political issues, places his characters in a particular historical context and, thus, investigates the impact on their lives, the latter, by means of an original approach to editing, tells his stories through daring repetitions, parallelisms and visual and sonic interconnections, creating a film world that has a logic of its own. Born in Famagusta, on the island of Cyprus, Derviú Zaim (1964), graduated in Business Administration, before undertaking cinema studies. Following the completion of an experimental video and a documentary, Zaim made his debut with Tabutta rövaúata (Somersault in a Coffin) (1996), an excellent work made with a very low budget which obtained success and awards at various international festivals, contributing significantly to encouraging new filmmakers to shoot in an independent manner, with limited resources. It is a realistic drama, but it is also rich in allegorical meanings and resonances. The protagonist is Maksun (Ahmet U÷urlu), a thirty-year-old homeless and marginalised man, who wanders adrift in the streets of Rumelihisari, one of the oldest and most “picturesque” neighbourhoods in Istanbul, overlooking the Bosporus.

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Figure 2.8: Set photo from Elephants and Grass (2000), by Dervis Zaim

Maksun tries to survive with the help of the fishermen. During the cold winter nights he steals cars to sleep inside, but then he always returns them in order. Every now and then he is arrested and beaten by police officers. But he is actually a gentle man, who is loyal to his fellow vagrants. He also lives a pathetic love story with a young woman who is heroin addict (Ayúen Atasever). As a protagonist, Maksun represents both possibility and impossibility, in a world where friendship and loneliness, trust and betrayal, love and hate, hope and despair coexist. This film offers a genuine and empathetic portrait of social “outcasts,” with absurd, provocative, comical, distressing and sentimental connotations. The narrative ellipsis, the use of the off-screen space and the tension between internal and external, in part due to the lack of technological resources, become distinctive stylistic elements in the film. Later, Zaim enhanced his production methods, modulating the planning and the budgeting according to the type of stories and narration that he has undertaken from time to time. Filler veçimen (Elephants and Grass) (2000) consists of six different stories that converge into a single strand: that of political conspiracy. Indeed, the film is inspired by a famous political scandal (the Susurluk case of 1996) and it reflects the dark background of relations between the Mafia and the state that caused

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the severe political instability of the '90s. Zaim describes murders, tortures, political killings, illicit trafficking and narcotics cases. What emerges is a complex picture with a – sometimes confused – excess of themes and ideas, but also a remarkable aesthetic sensibility with various evocative images. In contrast Çamur (Mud) (2003) is an atypical black comedy which tells the story of a soldier who performs his military service in Cyprus, in the years that followed the Turkish military intervention that resulted in the ethno-political partition of the island and in the enduring armed tension. The young man is unable to articulate words as a result of an obscure disease and heals through the application of a potion made of mud. It is clear that this is a symbolic representation of the political and social trauma experienced by Turkish Cypriots. Afterwards, Zaim created an evocative trilogy dedicated to the art forms of the Ottoman tradition. Cennet Beklerken (Waiting for Heaven) (2006) is a road movie, filled with symbolism, set in the 17th century. It is a multi-layered story connected to the power struggles within the Ottoman Empire. The protagonist is Eflatun, a master miniaturist of the court in Istanbul who, after the death of his wife and son, paints them in a western figurative style, thereby violating the Islamic religious precepts. On the other hand, he is conscious of the “sin” he has committed and his distress is manifested in dreams, memories and ethical dilemmas. Subsequently, the Grand Vizier orders him to paint the realistic portrait of Prince Danyal who led a revolt against the Sultan and is awaiting his execution. Eflatun is conflicted, but he must obey and go to Anatolia. The film deals with several themes: the identity of the artist and his controversial relationships with the government authority; the relationship between art and reality; the historical period in question and the struggle for power; the opposition and the differences between East and West in the domains of art and culture. It offers multi-dimensional storytelling and very impressive visual aesthetics, with frequent visual transitions from the miniatures to the substance of paintings and photographs. Nokta (Dot) (2008) proposes an existential journey that revolves around the themes of crime and punishment. At the centre of the story is the hat, the ancient art of calligraphy. The story takes place in one location, Konya, in Anatolia, but embraces two different time frames. In the 13th century, during the Mongol invasion, a calligrapher, located in a desert of salt, traces a few sacred words on the ground. He refuses to escape until he has finished the job. In contemporary times, in the same place, Ahmet, a young student of calligraphy, is persuaded by a friend to steal, and then try to sell, an ancient and very precious Koran. This crime will be fatal to him and will lead him to a desperate search for redemption. The film is designed as a

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continuous flow, through the frequent framing of the sky, despite the cuts and the flashbacks. Gölgeler ve suretler (Shadows and Faces) (2010) deals with the theme of hope and tolerance in a situation of ethnic conflict. In particular, it describes the dynamics of protection against the dangers brought by the looming war. The story takes place in Cyprus in 1963 and concerns two families, one Greek, headed by Anna (Popi Avraam), and one Turkish, headed by Veli (Osman Alkaú), who live in a remote village in the mountains. Both intend to survive without harm to anyone, and so they establish a mutual pact of non-aggression. In reality the Turks are in a minority and, in the case of an outbreak of armed incidents, stoked by the Greek police, they may succumb. Furthermore, young people of both communities hide weapons and seek confrontation leading to an atmosphere of violence and paranoia. What emerges is a persuasive dramatic scenario. Zaim introduces strong psychological elements. Moreover, even in this case, he incorporates an element of the Ottoman tradition: the Karagöz that is the Turkish shadow theatre. It is the symbol of the tension between light and darkness, where evil and misfortune hide. Zaim’s latest works focus on the relationships between the members of a specific community and nature. These films are charming, brave and unusual. Devir (The Cycle) (2012) is set in the village of Hasanpaúa, in the district of Burdur in the southwest of the country: an area of sheep and goat farming. It describes the daily life of this small community and the preparation and carrying out of a traditional competition among shepherds that occurs at the end of each summer. In particular it focuses on two characters. Takmaz, one of the elders, was proclaimed champion and won the award in the last eight editions of the tournament. Ali, one of the youngest, discouraged after another defeat, leaves his farming activity and finds work as a truck driver at the nearby marble quarry. Zaim creates, not without some didacticism, a mix of documentary, fictional and fantastic elements trying to highlight the existential limbo of the shepherds, among strong traditions, ancestral beliefs and looming modernity. Even Balik (Fish) (2014), set in Gölyaz, a village near Lake Uluabat, in the province of Bursa, focuses on the relationships between people and nature. At the centre of the plot is the family of Kaya (Bülent Inal), a poor fisherman. His wife Filiz (Sanem Çelik) is distressed because Diniz (Myraslava Kostyeva), their teenage daughter, cannot talk. So she decides to try an ancient remedy recommended by ancestral traditions: feeding the little girl with fish fry, that is the progeny, of some rare species of fish. The matter becomes more complicated because those fish are scarce in the lake and because Kaya would like to breed them for commercial purposes, but doesn’t have the money needed to start the business. The film achieves

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verisimilitude via its serious documentary approach and by its precise description of the characters’ behaviours and of their attachment to traditional culture. The narrative structure is simple, but never trivial, and offers many exciting moments. Reha Erdem (1960) studied film and visual arts in Paris. His cinema is characterised by strong poetic elements and a very original narrative and visual style, with innovative and experimental editing solutions, stringent shots, and expressive sound design. Many of his films tell coming-of-age stories, with difficult or impossible conclusions because of the obstacles that the characters must face. He made his debut with A Ay (Oh Moon) (1988), an extraordinary film, in black and white and in 16mm format. The protagonist is Yekta (Yeúim Tözün), an orphan girl of ten who lives with her grandfather and two aunts in a small house overlooking the Bosporus. In the course of the story, her silence stands out, while all the adults oppress her with continuous recommendations on how to behave and how to prepare for the future. Yekta wants to continue to remember her mother, between fragments of memories and illusions. Erdem creates a liminal atmosphere of temporal suspension, between past and present, dream and reality, and fills it with bizarre characters. Kaç para kaç (A Run for Money) (1999) tells the story of a man (Taner Birsl) who finds a bag with a large amount of cash inside, and describes his progressive mental deterioration resulting from his obsessive dependence on this money. The film boasts a stronger than usual narrative though it includes experimental editing. Korkuyorum Anne (Mommy, I’m Scared) (2004), set in Istanbul, artificially recreates the city by composing a puzzle of carefully selected images. On the surface it is a “comedy of errors” that describes the struggle of a man (Ali Düúenkalkan) who is losing his memory and is tormented by his subconscious. However, by exploring the theme of adult males who are unable to break away from their mothers, Erdem also provides a universal exploration of the difficulty of growing up and the fragility of human existence. What emerges is once again anti-narrative, with events and visions that intertwine and multiply without any real conclusion. Beúvakit (Times and Winds) (2006) is set in a small, poor village located on the rugged uplands overlooking the Aegean Sea. The story is divided into five parts, being marked by the daily prayer calls. In a seemingly timeless scenery, the narration focuses on episodes of the delicate transitional age of three boys. Oppressed by the rigid patriarchal norms that must obey, they dream of annihilating their parents. Faced with the first amorous impulses, they alternate hope and disappointment, joy, irritation and anger. The film is characterized by rich and powerful

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Figure 2.9: Beú vakit (Times and Winds) (2006), by Reha Erdem

images, real and symbolic at the same time, while the dialogue is scarce. Erdem shows the incessant repetitive rhythm of rural nature and interposes idyllic scenes with sequences concerning the depressing violence of adults. The slow pace and the meditative sequence shots recall films by the Italian filmmakers Ermanno Olmi and Franco Piavoli. Hayat var (My Only Sunshine) (2008) is a bold drama that combines realism and poetry. It reveals the difficulty and the suffocating constriction that characterize human relationships in a proletarian, poor and decayed area of Istanbul. At the same time, the film describes the difficult maturation of a 14-year-old girl, Hayat (Elit øúcan), who is going through puberty. The girl resides in a modest log cabin, located on the bank of a narrow arm of the sea, on the outskirts of the metropolis that shines in the distance during the clear spring days. She lives with her father (Erdal Beúikçio÷lu), a shabby forty-year-old fisherman who, in reality, survives by trafficking in smuggled goods and procuring alcohol and prostitutes to the sailors of the big ships anchored in the Bosporus strait. At home her grandfather (Levend Yilmaz), immobilized by asthma, lies in bed, perpetually suffering and in a bad mood. Her mother (Banu Fotocan) lives in the city, having formed a new family, and she is not interested in her. Hayat feels awkward and has the habit of muttering. She occasionally goes to school in the city, but is the butt of her peers’ humour. She often wanders in poor neighbourhoods, risking being sexually harassed. The relationships among the characters are marked by indifference and are reduced to material exchanges with no emotional entanglements. The bodies of water, from the smallest to the open sea, take on a symbolic value, and the camera often lingers on wavelets and breaking waves. Erdem demonstrates a certain affinity with Otar Iosseliani in that he builds

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an atmosphere that is full of emotions, developed through a slow but significant flow of painful episodes, that encompass disappointment and brutality, but also of tentative hopes. Photography, editing and, especially, the sound design are extraordinary. Kosmos (Cosmos) (2010) is an atypical and ambitious drama, characterized by kinetic energy. Set in winter, the film tells of the disturbing arrival of Kosmos (Sermet Yesil), a significant eponym for a bizarre thirty-year-old fugitive, in a remote frontier town. He is a dishevelled and unkempt man who moves with animal-like jerks, climbs trees with great agility, and displays childish behaviour. He wanders, tireless, doesn’t sleep and only eats sugar. Shortly after his arrival, he saves a young boy from drowning in a stream and seems to almost resuscitate him. Soon he becomes the man who makes miracles and raises the population’s enthusiasm, disrupting the stoic routine of the inhabitants. This ambiguously messianic character is convinced of his own powers and, becoming increasingly bold, produces miraculous healings. But his mockery of rules and work, his despotism and his continuous and provocative expressions of love, alienate him from the sympathy of many. He partners with Neptün (Türkü Turan), the younger sister of the rescued child: together, they position themselves on terraces and trees and imitate birds’ calls and twitters. Meanwhile, incidents of domestic burglary increase, leading to a tragic but ambiguous ending. Erdem paints a fresco of illusions, mysteries and dark threats; he multiplies the symbolism and seems to emphasize the transience of human existence. The whole film is shot in a perpetual bleak light or in semi-darkness. Despite the suggestion of the locations and of certain sequences, the film seems confused and contradictory, caught between an unusual energetic approach and a nihilistic despair. Jin (2013) represents an explicit incursion into the multi-year tragic story of Kurdistan, where the Peshmerga, the Kurdish nationalist guerrillas, and the Turkish army have been fighting for thirty years. In fact, the film uses the frame of the armed conflict to create a suggestive “ecological” and metaphorical parable, with thriller elements, set among magnificent mountains and characterized by hints of magic realism. It provides an empathetic portrait of Jin (Deniz Hasgüler), a 17-year-old guerrilla who deserted, being determined to live and to get to a big city. The young woman wanders alone through the forests, fearing both her former comrades and the Turkish soldiers. She bravely faces a bear and shows her solidarity with other animals. One day she meets and rescues a Turkish soldier, a wounded young recruit, but then she abandons him. At ease with nature thanks to her petite but well-trained figure, she is unable

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to leave the field of battle, and must evade checkpoints, gunfights and the danger of male aggressions. Left with little hope, she goes back to the forest,

Figure 2.10:Jin (2013), by Reha Erdem

leading to a tragic ending of rare emotional power. The photography, by Florent Herry, masterfully captures the lush landscape and helps trigger a vaguely dreamy and aesthetic atmosphere. ùarki söyleyen kadinlar (Singing Women) (2013) is a film that challenges genre classifications. It mixes suggestions of apocalyptic drama, social satire, family conflicts and unusual all-female existentialism, in the framework of a dark parable, full of cryptic symbols. Possibly influenced by painful events in the director’s life, it is a work that may be considered unresolved, pretentious and repetitious. Set on an island not far from Istanbul, it focuses on situation of fatal emergency. Following an alarm for an imminent earthquake, an evacuation order is issued and groups of inhabitants depart without delay. In an atmosphere of desertion, and of progressive material difficulties, are set the stories of the characters that have decided to stay. Individuals trapped among mutual intolerance and hate, resulting from hidden conflicts, and tangles of pathetic and dysfunctional passions. Meanwhile, the horses die of a mysterious disease. The scenes showing two female characters’ connection to nature appear naive, but discordant and obscure. It seems that the events create a sort of strict divine lesson given to humans, particularly to men. Having grown up in the coastal town of Trabzon on the Black Sea and with a background in architecture, Yeúim Ustao÷lu (1960) began her

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career in cinema with four short films and at the same time she has been devoted to journalism and film criticism. As a director, she is very interested in social issues, particularly those affecting minority groups, and in the matter of the identity of “Others.” Her cinema, both bold and refined, constantly offers a portrait of individuals who face obstacles and prejudices to defend their choices of dignity and freedom. She debuted with Iz (The Trace) (1994), a psychological thriller with Kafkaesque implications. It tells the story of Kemal (Aytaç Arman), a security guard who investigates the life of a clarinet player who committed suicide. Ustao÷lu creates an intriguing claustrophobic atmosphere, using the locations, the narrow streets and the small and ambiguous nightclubs of the historical centre of Istanbul, to good effect. Her framings denote a particular ability in exploiting the spaces. Her following film, Günese yolculuk (Journey to the Sun) (1999), shows a growing maturity and a personal approach to the issues of political identity and discrimination linked to ethnic prejudices. It tells the story of the friendship between two working-class men, the Turkish Mehmet (Newroz Baz) and the Kurdish Berzan (Nazmi Krk). Mehmet, because of his dark skin, is considered Kurdish and is mistreated as such. At the beginning they don’t know each other. Both natives of Anatolia, they have come to Istanbul to seek employment and a better future. Mehmet finds a job in a company that is in charge of repairing the frequent failures of the water supply of the city. Berzan becomes a peddler of music cassettes. Having accidentally met, they gradually become united and together face the challenges of the urban jungle whose acute tensions are effectively described. When the police kill Berzan during a demonstration, Mehmet assumes the sad task of taking the coffin to Zorduch, his friend’s hometown. In the course of his journey in the far east of the country, he realizes the absurdity of nationalist rhetoric, having personally experienced the overcoming of the boundaries among different identities. But when he reaches his destination, he discovers that the village no longer exists because it was submerged by the reservoir created by a new artificial dam. Journey to the Sun is a film that describes the distressing formation of a conscience through a sincere humanist approach. It explores a theme that at the time was considered taboo and it shows the reality about the police and the military repression, which were particularly violent in the early 1990s. The images of the forced eviction of Kurds from their previously marked homes, of the interrogations and of the tortures are impressive, but without rhetoric. At the same time Ustao÷lu inspired a subsequent generation of filmmakers who are committed to producing conscious and truthful works in relation to the political and social context.

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Bulutlari beklerken (Waiting for the Clouds) (2003) is a strong drama, rich in visual qualities. It is appropriately set in a remote location where the memory of a historical tragedy has affected entire lives. Ayshe (Rüçhan Caliskur) lives in Treblou, a fishing village on the Black Sea coast, in the region of the north-eastern border. She is an old woman, alone and avoided by her neighbours who consider her slightly crazy. Only two men care about her condition. The action takes place in the 1970s, when a collective paranoia against communists and ethnic minorities reigns in the country. One day an old foreigner, Tanassis (Dimitris Kaberidis), arrives in the village. His relationship with Ayshe is gradually disclosed, revealing her past as a Greek girl called Eleni. During the ethnic cleansing, in the winter of 1916, this woman was saved, having been adopted by a Muslim Turkish family. Furthermore, after 50 years, she still lives in a state of constant fear. But finally she overcomes it with much effort and travels to Greece in search of her younger brother from whom she was separated. Ustao÷lu enhances the themes of distance and imaginary boundaries, beyond the physical ones, to be exceeded. She effectively constructs the world of her protagonist, carefully composing the images and using profusely long takes and sustained, uncut shots. Pandora’n inkutusu (Pandora’s Box) (2008) is a family and generational drama focusing on the theme of old age. The quality of the film, a story of different losses and searches, resides in the acute psychological study of the characters and in the representation of the alienation rooted in contemporary urban life. The story begins when two sisters in their forties, Nesrin (Derya Alabora) and Güzin (Övül Avkiran), who live in Istanbul, receive the news that their ninety-year-old mother, Nusret (Tsilla Chelton) lies gravely ill, alone in the old family home, located in a mountain village on the Black Sea coast. The two women involve their reluctant brother, the thirty-year-old Mehmet (Osamm Sonant), a post litteram hippie who lives a carefree existence without any precise occupation, and embark on a journey by car, to see their mother. They find her in good physical condition, but disoriented and confused. They decide to take her with them to Istanbul and begin to host her in turn. But it emerges that Nusret is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Nesrin and Güzin continue to blame each other. Their lives as petty-bourgeois women are different, but both of them are slaves of consumer society, foreign with respect to the memory of the traditional rural culture, frustrated and dissatisfied. They can’t manage their own existential problems and therefore are much less able to deal with the cognitive decline of their mother. The only one who is able to establish a genuine communicative relationship with Nusret is her grandson Murat (Onur

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Unsal), Nesrin’s son. A rebellious student in search of an identity, he is the one who fulfils the desire of Nusret to return to her peaceful life in the old house. Ustao÷lu presents a diverse cross-section of Turkish society today, where the city-countryside division takes on a fundamental significance. She also takes a sharp look at the different generational expectations and the vain search for a balance in life. She combines sensitive, tough and even humorous elements, and shows a remarkable formal care when filming both the natural landscapes in the rural areas and the colourful contradictions and chaotic traffic of Istanbul. Araf (Somewhere in Between) (2012) is an uncompromising existential drama that borders on tragedy. Set in an inland area of Anatolia where traditional values still prevail, it represents a painful coming-of-age film that focuses on two teenagers on the threshold of adulthood. They are individuals with no special qualities, trapped in a sort of vacuum or “emotional middle earth,” unable to cope with the consequences of their actions and forced to survive after a terrible rift in their relationship. The eighteen-year-olds Zehra (Neslihan Atagül) and Olgun (Bariú Hacihan) are colleagues in a service station cafeteria and restaurant located on a major communication road. All around there is an abandoned industrial area together with signs of the economic crisis. It is a tough and monotonous job, with endless shifts. Then, at the end of the day, the employees must get in a van that returns them to their homes in the countryside, where they live in contact with the rites of the patriarchal families. It is a closed world where the adults are unable, or unwilling, to understand the concerns of young people. The two teenagers have a strong friendship. Olgun is in love and would like to strongly evolve their relationship by establishing a sentimental bond. However, he is shy and introverted, while the girl doesn’t seem to be willing to commit to him. They both dream of a happy future, nourishing their hopes with the images of “fantastic” lives represented in television programmes. The beautiful Zehra would like to go far away to live a fairytale dream with the love of her life. Olgun, instead, would like to participate in a quiz show in order to win, become rich and marry the woman he loves. One day a mysterious lorry driver passing by, the thirty-year-old Mahur (Özcan Deniz), arouses the attention of Zehra. After some time, the two find themselves invited to a wedding and are forced to spend a chaste night in the house of a friend. From that moment, a short and intense clandestine love affair begins: a relationship that completely involves the girl, but which for the mature man is a mere flirtation. The situation worsens when Zehra becomes pregnant. Being unable to communicate it to her family, she procrastinates until she gives birth to a dead foetus in the hospital’s bathroom. Olgun,

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upon discovering this, turns his violence against Zehra’s girlfriend and ends up in jail, before the unexpected conclusion. The quality of the film emerges in the psychological study of the characters and in the representation of their identity crisis. Ustao÷lu demonstrates a rigorous style. She carefully avoids a prosaic approach, even in the most dramatic moments. Thus, she visually enhances the unexpressed emotions. The intensity of the gaze is expressed both in the sequences where the camera explores the characters' bodies at close range and during the frequent long shots that frame the landscape. Much of the film takes place in winter, between snowstorms and dark and misty skies, then there are glimpses of spring sun, but these are only fleeting. Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu (1959), native of Trabzon on the Black Sea coast and a graduate of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, carried out fine arts studies in Wien. He is a multidisciplinary artist: a filmmaker, but also a painter, a novelist and a literary critic. His approach is purely anthropological and socio-political, showing a full awareness of the multiple levels of marginalization and exclusion affecting contemporary Turkey. His films are set in poor, degraded and generally ignored Istanbul suburbs: Küçükpazar, Altinúehir and Tarlabaúi. His male antiheroes, who find refuge in those places, are presented without moralistic judgments or stereotyping, in a mix of realism and naturalism. These men are psychologically suffering or wounded, dominated by passions and obsessions, and unable to find an emotional balance. Caught between aggressiveness and passivity, desperate, but also resigned, they are protagonists of tragic melodramas, with noir atmospheres. After making two short films, he made his debut with Hiçbir yerde (In Nowhere Land) (2001), a psychological drama with a strong political value. At the centre of the story is Sükran (Zuhal Olcay), a mother in search of Veysel, her twenty-year-old son who is missing in suspicious circumstances. The woman, already deprived of her husband, who has been detained for political reasons, is determined to find her son, who disappeared along with Halil, his best friend. The truth is that the young man died. But, when the police show Sükran his bleeding body, the woman refuses to identify him. In contrast, Veysel’s girlfriend is certain about the identity of the deceased, but ends up being the subject of serious allegations by Sükran. She then finds out that a prisoner, who has the same name as her son, Veysel Aksu (Ruhi Sari), has escaped and has been reported in the town of Mardin. After intensive researches, she succeeds in meeting this young man, but she realizes the misunderstanding. However, later, when the young man is himself killed, she identifies his body as that of her son. Therefore, the director introduces the theme of collective responsibility

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with respect to the victims of state repression. He also focuses on the theme of identity that will become a constant in his filmography. He produces an intriguing work, open to various levels of interpretation and with an impressive documentary-like ending. A drawback lies in the representation of the periodic hallucinations of the female protagonist, often recklessly interposed in the course of the story. Subsequently Pirselimo÷lu created the “Trilogy of Conscience and Death” which offers portraits of characters belonging to the lower classes and the marginalized. The dominant theme of the three films is death, but the scenarios of the stories determine different options and atmospheres and are respectively connected to three different concepts: consciousness, despair and obsession. Riza (2007) is a drama-thriller that echoes Dostoevsky. The eponymous protagonist of the story, Riza (Riza Akin), is a forty-year-old driver who makes his living by operating freight transport with his truck on the long journey from Istanbul to Adana. One day, when he has just returned to Istanbul, the engine breaks down. Riza is desperate, because he has no money and moreover the truck is mortgaged and therefore at risk of repossession. Waiting to find any job, he is forced to stay in a shabby hotel, prisoner of a gruelling routine. The other unhappy inhabitants of the hotel include: an old man waiting for his son and watching television incessantly; a young Kurdish peddler; a gay sailor waiting for boarding on his ship; and an old Afghan man and his daughterin-law who hope to emigrate illegally in Italy. Riza tries to get a loan from Aysel (Nurcan Eren), an ex-girlfriend of his who runs a small laundry business, but the woman refuses with suffering and resentment. At this point Riza commits a reprehensible crime: he robs a dead man. Then, burdened by guilt and remorse, he returns to Aysel, but discovers that she hides a secret. Unemployment, frustrated hopes and dilapidated housing are presented with stark realism: images are constructed with accuracy. Real locations and emblematic and expressive characters, treated with obvious empathy, help to articulate the clear narrative of doom that unfolds slowly and inexorably. Pus (Haze) (2009) is a minimalist existential drama with atypical thriller elements. Set in the proletarian district of Altinúehir, it tells the story of Reúat (Ruhi Sari), a twenty-yearold man who makes counterfeit DVDs. Antisocial and unable to relate to others, he lives with his invalid mother in a squalid apartment in the suburbs and has an obsessive interest in a young woman who lives in the same building. Moreover, to overcome his existential boredom, he compulsively steals small objects. One day he steals a package left by a friend of his boss. He opens it and finds a gun, along with photos of a woman and an address. He goes there and spies on a couple in crisis: a

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Figure 2.11: Saç (Hair) (2010), by Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu

butcher and a seamstress. Finally, Reúat meets the man, Emin (Mehmet Avci), who commissions him to murder his wife (Nurcan Ülger), the woman in the photo. However, Emin asks him not to make her suffer because he loves her too much. A peculiar portrait of individuals, each unable to express their feelings and burdened by unbearable despair: souls trapped in a bleak urban space. Pirselimo÷lu creates an intriguing and gripping film, which is also a persuasive study of loneliness and alienation, without psychological pretensions. The style is seductive: elliptical narration, slow pace, minimal dialogue and stylised images, in high definition, almost monochrome. The final film in the Trilogy, Saç (Hair) (2010), is a rich expressionist drama. It explores, with great lucidity, existential relations and human frailty. The protagonist is Hamdi (Ayberk Pekcan), a forty-year-old owner of a wig shop, located in a run-down area of Istanbul city centre. Aware that he is dying of cancer and that he is having a limited remaining lifetime, Hamdi is mired in a mixture of boredom, irritation, pain and loneliness that leads him to no longer tolerate his empty and meaningless routine. He wants to leave and dreams of settling in Brazil, but he doesn’t take any decision. Thus, he continues to stay day and night in his ateliershop with attached flat, smoking a lot and with no expectations. One day Meryem (Nazan Kesal), a thirty-year-old woman, dressed in modest clothing, but fascinating, enters his shop and sells her long beautiful hair because she needs money. Hamdi sees her crying and, from that moment, he is irresistibly attracted to her and she becomes his obsession. Meryem is trapped in a miserable existence, being married to Musa (Riza Akin), a coarse man who works in a morgue and who betrays her. The film is set in an autumnal Istanbul where dark and deep colours and faded images

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prevail, rendered with masterful photography by Erkan Özkan. Pirselimo÷lu favours a slow pace, extended static shots and indoor sets, with a shrewd use of space that configures claustrophobic environments interacting with the intimate discomfort of the characters. He draws effective performances from his extraordinary actors and enhances the film with a soundscape made only of diegetic noises of the city. He shows a mature narrative approach that outlines an engaging scenario, which does not allow for catharsis, even when it seems that the desires of the protagonist are fulfilled, because it does not permit any exits. Pirselimo÷lu’s latest film, Ben o de÷ilim (I’m Not Him) (2013), is another powerful existential drama, this time focusing on themes of identity and the fascination with the “Other.” The protagonist is Nihat (Ercan Kesal), a lonely and introverted fifty-year-old man, perpetually sullen and impassive, who works in the kitchen of a hospital’s canteen. His existence is disturbed when he realizes that he is the object of the affections of Ayúe (Maryam Zaree), a mysterious thirty-year-old woman hired as a dishwasher. Despite being informed that Necip, the woman's husband, is serving a long prison sentence, Nihat, albeit reluctantly, accepts a dinner invitation from Ayúe. On this occasion he happens to look closely at a photo of the woman’s husband, whereupon he realises that he bears an uncanny resemblance to the other man: a stranger who could almost be his twin. He is driven to begin an affair with the woman, and moves in with her. But this situation is both strange and ambiguously morbid for Nihat. Ayúe makes active efforts to make their relationship happy but Nihat shows no great passion for her, except by trying to make himself look even more like Necip. The result is a series of unexpected, decisive and surreal events. Once again in this film, Pirselimo÷lu remains true to his minimalist aesthetic and his measured yet taut narrative structure and he exploits the expressiveness of his actors. He creates an intriguing and problematic fresco, not to be confused with a story of mental disorder. In fact, he declared that the theme of identity, whether lost or stolen or claimed, is a metaphor for contemporary Turkey. His protagonist slips gradually and consciously towards an inescapable destiny, because even when he could back out of it, he is dominated by the strong desire to be the “Other”.

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Figure 2.12: Ben o de÷ilim (I’m Not Him) (2013), by Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu

Other directors of the same generation must also be considered. Some of them have narrated stories set in rural provinces, describing customs and traditions and the contradictions that emerge in recent times. Ahmet Uluçay (1954 - 2009), with a background as a documentary filmmaker, directed his debut film, Karpuz kabu÷undan gemiler yapmak (Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds) (2004), starting from a consideration of his childhood in the countryside. However, his approach is different to that of similarly autobiographical works by Ceylan or Kaplano÷lu. The story, a coming-of-age film, takes place in the 1960s in Tepecik, a small village in the rural Anatolian hinterland. It focuses on two teenagers who are friends and who work as apprentices in the nearby town of Tavúanli: Recep is an assistant to a melon-seller and Mehmet learns the trade of barber. Both are madly passionate about cinema and dream of a future as directors. As it is absolutely impossible for them to buy equipment, they build a rudimentary wooden projector powered by a battery-powered lamp. Having settled in an abandoned stable, they use scraps of film and try to achieve the

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amazing result of a 24 frames per second speed. The only witness and supporter of their efforts is Ömer, who is viewed by everyone as the village idiot. Meanwhile, Recep falls in love with Nihal, a haughty girl from Tavúanli, but his feelings are not reciprocated. Furthermore, the two intrepid friends think that, thanks to cinema, they will be able to overcome the sense of inferiority they experience in relation to the city boys. Uluçay cast ordinary people from his village and made them act. In this film he recalls his relationship with cinema, a source of personal and creative expression, but also a means to combat the social pressure of a traditional and hidebound environment. The politically engaged Reis Çelik (1961) is the director of Isiklar sönmesin (There Be Light) (1996), Hosçakal yarin (Goodbye Tomorrow) (1998) Mülteci (Refugee) (2007) and of one of the short films that is part of full length feature F tipi film (F Type Film) (2012), all dramatic films regarding the State repression against the opponents of radical leftist groups and the conflict in Kurdistan and its terrible consequences. He also directed Lal gece (Night of Silence) (2012), a drama that effectively describes the centuries-old tradition of male dominance in Turkish society and reveals its hidden face. The story takes place in a remote village in Anatolia over one day and night. It opens with a grand wedding ceremony, among harnessed horses, drums, cymbals, dancing and shooting: faces of farmers and gorgeous costumes. It is an arranged marriage and the viewer discovers its purpose is to put an end to a bloody feud between rival families. The groom is about 60 years old and has spent much of his life in prison, being responsible for two crimes of honour. The bride is a young girl and, during the ceremony, the banquet and the party, her face is covered with a precious red embroidered veil. They have never met before that day and at night they find themselves alone in the bridal suite. There are ancient rituals to be satisfied, but gradually they begin to talk. Thus the film becomes a significant chamber drama: they will play an intimate and claustrophobic chess game. The man is uncomfortable and at the limits of despair, but he tries to be polite. The 14-year-old wife is initially scared, but then he challenges him with a stubborn wit and tries to share her naive view of life with him, until the unexpected conclusion. Çelik’s approach is honest, lyrical and intense. The narration is evocative, although a little unbalanced by grotesque elements that are not always appropriate. The photography by Gökhan Tiryaki skilfully modulates the light contrasts and the kaleidoscope of colours. Kutlu÷ Ataman (1961), an internationally known filmmaker and video artist, is the director of the following films: Karanlk sular (The Serpent’s Tale) (1994), a dark family story with gothic suggestions set in Istanbul;

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Lola ve Bilidikid (Lola + Bilidikid) (1998), a touching melodrama set in the community of gay Turkish immigrants in Berlin; øki Gençkiz (2 Girls) (2006), a drama about the friendship and love between two teenagers from different social backgrounds set in contemporary Istanbul; Aya seyahat (Journey to the Moon) (2009), a brilliant mockumentary set in a remote village in 1957, which actually provides a sharp examination of contemporary Turkish society and culture. His recent Kuzu (The Lamb) (2014) is both a dramatic portrait of a rural community, with some elements of acerbic humour, and a controversial coming-of-age film. In a village in the hills of eastern Anatolia, following the tradition, each family is required to celebrate the circumcision of their child with a feast. Little Mert (Mert Tastan) is waiting for the fateful day, but his father Ismail (Cahit Gok), who works in a slaughterhouse, does not have the money to buy the needed goat for the traditional banquet with family and friends. Meanwhile Vicdan (Sila Lara Canturk), the boy’s sister, is annoyed at the fact that he is the favoured child. She has fun tormenting Mert by telling him that in the end, in order not to irritate the guests, their father will be obliged to slit his throat and serve him to the guests. After various events in which dignity and pride are brought into play, the problem is resolved in a surprising manner. Despite the obvious empathy of the director for his protagonists and the inspired description of the winter landscape and of the local customs and traditions, the film turns out to be too sentimental and the adult characters are not adequately developed. Muzaffer Özdemir (1955), awarded Best Actor at the 59th Cannes Film Festival for Ceylan’s Uzak (Distant), and with a background as an amateur documentary filmmaker, directed Yurt (Home) (2011), his first feature film. It explores two themes: the memory of ancient times and the denunciation of the uncontrolled industrialisation which has resulted in the devastation of the land. The protagonist is Dogan (Kanbolat Görkem Arslan), an experienced forty-year-old architect with an introverted and pessimistic nature. One day he becomes ill, manifesting psychosomatic symptoms, and his doctor advises him to travel. Dogan returns to his birthplace, a mountainous area in the interior of the Black Sea coast, from which he has been absent for many years. He takes the opportunity to visit his sister and brother-in-law. During his stay, he carries out some excursions in the surroundings. Gradually he finds out that the construction of a massive hydroelectric plant has compromised the rivers’ flow and has resulted in damage to nature. He realizes that the people and things of his childhood have disappeared, and becomes aware of the indifference towards the situation of degradation by those who live there. The film’s elegiac and meditative tone does not detract from its political

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significance, enhanced by expressive visuals and an effective sound design. The issue of the contradictory presence of religious organizations in social life and their activities has also been addressed. In this regard Özer Kiziltan (1963) made an excellent debut film, Takva (A Man’s Fear of God) (2006), produced by the collective Yesi Sinemacilar (New Cineasts), an organization dedicated to auteur cinema. It is a drama constructed as a thriller, and a work that clearly explores the contradictions and the hypocrisy underlying the businesses operated by an Islamic religious brotherhood. The story takes place in modern times, in an old Istanbul district. The protagonist is Muharrem (Erkan Can), a modest forty-year-old employee, poor, lonely and introverted. He is a peaceful person, deeply responsible and pious: he prays daily in the mosque, is indifferent to worldly pleasures and practices sexual abstinence. Noticed by the leaders of the rich Islamic brotherhood that he attends, he is commissioned to collect the rents of the many properties owned by them and, in a short time, he becomes a modern executive. Despite his best intentions, he gets involved in shady dealings, acting ruthlessly against the defaulting tenants. Yet Muharrem hasn’t forgotten a basic Islamic precept: takva, which means ‘the fear of God’, and which instructs against committing sins. He starts to feel a state of tension that becomes permanent and is haunted by the image of a seductive woman and by sexual nightmares. Tormented by doubts and by the fear of divine punishment, but unable to withdraw from his task, he falls into a serious decline. In the end, the religious leader of the sect arranges the wedding between Muharrem and his daughter. This film does not provide final answers with respect to the delicate issue of the possible compatibility between Islamic religion and the capitalist system, although it is eloquent on many aspects of morality and hypocrisy. Its strength lies in the screenplay by Önder Çakar, which expertly delineates the psychology of the characters, but also in the narrative rhythm, in the very credible setting and in the visual solutions that accompany the physical and moral defeat of the protagonist. Other filmmakers have chosen genre cinema, preferring thriller films, in order to provide interesting representations of social contradictions, sad portraits of women’s condition and even to refer implicitly to political issues concerning ethnic and religious minorities. Their stories generally focus on taciturn male protagonists as they confront a cruel world. Driven by wounded pride or a lust for power, these men often resort to violence. Moreover, they often indulge in self-pity and in a nihilist melancholy. These films are generally set in Istanbul, in the narrow streets of the old

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centre of Beyo÷lu or in peripheral slums, such as Tarlabaúi, Laleli or Surdibi. The dominant feature is fear. The majority of the characters are suspicious of one other, even without logical reasons: this is a constant reference to the feelings of insecurity and intolerance that are present in the metropolis. In addition, it should be pointed out that the directors often introduce into their films elements to criticise their own work, through the surreal dynamics of the story. A few examples are annotated below. Serdar Akar (1964) debuted with Gemide (On Board) (1998), the first film produced by the collective Yesi Sinemacilar (New Cineasts). This film takes place almost entirely on board a cargo ship anchored in a dock of the Bosporus strait. A group of violent sailors, led by the captain, run into a Slavic prostitute and detain her against her will. Actually, the woman is the victim of a pimp who wants to resell her, passing her off as a virgin. The sailors in turn are involved in the matter of a loot that was stolen from them by a criminal gang. Beyond a certain misogyny that is present in this provocative saga, it must be recognised as an original contribution to the genre, with eclectic references to the American cinema of the late 1990s, in its formalist visual presentation and in the “experimental” staging. Undoubtedly, it is a singular variation on the inability to articulate a real and effective verbal communication. Moreover, it is a film that has in turn influenced, in later years, many independent Turkish filmmakers. Akar then made Barda (In the Bar) (2006), another highly controversial claustrophobic thriller, full of stylised violence. At the centre of the story are some middle-class teenagers of the residential district of Etiler. One evening they gather in group in a bar. They are very upset by the fact that one of their girlfriends is pregnant and discuss what they see as the choice between abortion and marriage. Five men burst into the bar, harassing and assaulting them in an outbreak of senseless violence that reveals the incompatibility of different social and cultural contexts in today’s Turkey. The narration is unconventional and the ending is ironic, with surreal and metaphorical implications, to underscore the fact that the story is entirely fictional. Ümit Ünal (1965) started his career with Dokuz (9) (2002), an intense crime drama that begins with the rape and murder of a stranger, committed in a small proletarian area in Istanbul. The police question six suspects who reveal facts and secrets of the quiet neighbourhood. The interrogations all take place all in the same room and the six suspects in turn sit on the same chair. The director uses a narrative technique that is almost documentary-like, refined and effective: cross-cutting between the interrogations allows him to present nine different frameworks. The result is an emphasis on gestural expressiveness. The film, shot on digital video

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converted to 35mm, tries to show the fascism that is present in Turkish society and its impact on the lives of ordinary people. Later, Ünal, along with Selim Demirdelen, Kudret Sabanc, Yücel Yolcu and Ömür Atay, made Anlat østanbul (Istanbul Tales) (2005), a collective film consisting of five interconnected stories set in contemporary Istanbul. The film presents portraits of the disposed, the underprivileged and marginal underclass and their stories, exploring the intolerance of the right-wing groups and of the State apparatuses against ethnic and political minorities and against diversity. Ünal also directed other atypical thrillers that are interesting for their psychological or surreal implications, but less successful. Gölgesizler (Shadowless) (2009) is a film with a Kafkaesque atmosphere, based on the cult novel by Hasan Ali Topbaú. The story takes place in an unnamed village in Anatolia and outlines complex and ambiguous relationships, against the backdrop of a bizarre landscape. In this timeless setting, suddenly a barber from Istanbul appears, his presence bearing witness to strange incidents and mysterious disappearances and premature deaths. SES (The Voice) (2010) is a partially intriguing horror-thriller. The protagonist is Derya (Selma Ergeç), a thirty-year-old single woman who is employed in the call centre of a bank and lives with her elderly mother. One day she begins to hear a voice inside herself. At first she tries to ignore it, but gradually she is completely dominated: the voice tells her where to go and what to do and she obeys until her life turns into a terrifying nightmare. According to the director, this is a metaphor for the impossibility to hide the lies and the repressed memories by individuals and society. NAR (Pomegranate) (2011) is a cold and artificially complicated vengeance thriller. The story introduces Asuman (Serra Yilmaz), a mature fortune-teller of humble origins who seems to possess considerable psychic powers, and Sema (Irem Altu÷), a thirty-year-old surgeon, bourgeois and neurotic. In fact, Asuman seeks revenge for a personal matter. According to the director, the film presents a concept of justice that is different for the different characters, linked to an imaginary depiction of the past events. Aydin Bulut (1968) made Baúka semtin çocuklari (Children of the Otherside) (2008), a very dark drama/thriller that combines the traumas of the military service experience at the time of the armed confrontation with the Kurds and those of the life in Gazi, an old ghettoized district in Istanbul. It tells the story of two brothers belonging to a working-class family of “Alevites,” members of a minority branch of Islam in Turkey. At the beginning of the film there is the discovery of the body of Veysel (Ismail Hacio÷lu) in a rubbish dump. Semih (Mehmet Ali Nuro÷lu), the older brother of the victim, who has just finished his military service in the

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south-eastern regions of the country, tries to discover the truth about the crime. But he uncovers a labyrinth of questions with few answers, and a more complex truth. The story is told through a collage of flashbacks, with an expressionist style. The results are unpolished, yet effective, and the film makes memorable use of claustrophobic spaces.

CHAPTER THREE A NEW GENERATION OF FILMMAKERS

Since the beginning of the last decade, a fourth generation of directors, born in the 1970s and 1980s, appeared at the forefront. Heirs of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Yeúim Ustao÷lu, Zeki Demirkubuz and Derviú Zaim, they share with those directors the idea of filmmaking with limited budgets. They are also fiercely independent, mostly residing in Istanbul and often connected with institutions and cultural organisations in the metropolis. Many of them have shared personal experiences or the engagement in important political battles. This is why, in general, they tend to conceive and implement new relationships between the consideration of their own past experiences and the social consciousness, although there can be no talk of manifestos or cultural movements. Though different from each other (Özcan Alper, Mehmet Bahadir Er, Selim Evci, Kazim Öz and Seyfi Teoman), and despite the absence of specific cinema studies, they learned their craft making short films that were also presented in international Festivals in Europe and worldwide. Thus, they develop new themes and aesthetics. Meanwhile, in Turkey, the general conditions have changed, producing a more favourable atmosphere and new opportunities for carrying out debut feature films and for the definition of a space for independent cinema out of the pressure of the increasingly commercial industry. On the one hand, the activity of the “Ministry of Culture’s Committee for Supporting Cinema” began in 2005. Since that time, despite some obvious controversy about the selection of the projects, the processes and the financing mechanisms work well. In the case of a first feature film, the maximum financial contribution by the State lies in a range between EUR 70,000 and 100,000, considered fair for Turkey. Furthermore, in Istanbul the technical support and the facilities in the hiring of equipment and in post-production, come from television networks that have increased their profit margins after the deregulation in the State monopoly of television and the liberalization that occurred in 1990. Lastly, there is the potential for financing to come from independent distribution companies. On the other hand, over the last decade there has still been the support of

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International Funds related to Festivals (such as the Hubert Bals Fund of Rotterdam and the World Cinema Fund of Berlin) who have recognized the quality of many Turkish film projects, selecting them and making them eligible for specific funding. In addition there have also been coproductions with companies from other European countries. Finally, it must be considered that the controversial policies of the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo÷an have offered increased opportunities for thematic diversification. The economic liberalization, the reduction of the role of the army and the project of “stabilization” of the conflict in Kurdistan, allow the films to critically address sensitive political and social subjects. At the same time, the political tensions, the scandals, the corruption trials and the crimes carried out by nationalist extremists, nurture the public’s interest in relation to issues such as law, morality, social order, the balance between tradition and modernization and the role of the Islamic religion and of the social and humanitarian organizations linked to it. These are all factors that stimulate the creativity and the expressiveness of the new generation of filmmakers. Many films concern the existential contradictions in the province, in the rural areas or in the big cities. They focus on family situations, couples’ or parent-child relationships, the lives of young people, women’s and labour issues, religious issues and moral dilemmas. This context determines the choice, in this chapter, to group the directors and the feature films, mainly debuts, in relation to the addressed topics. Belma Baú (1969) directed Zefir (Zephir) (2010) as her debut film, a minimalist drama set in a mountainous area of eastern Anatolia, overlooking the Black Sea. The protagonist is Zefir, a sensitive and determined little girl, who stays with her grandparents during the summer months. Every day she goes for a walk through the meadows and woods and observes the mysteries of nature. When her mother, who seems to be a nomad, restless and unable to carry out her role responsibly, goes to see her, Zefir understands that her mother’s motivation is to bid her a final farewell. Thus, after her mother’s departure, she follows her on the path and performs an extreme act. The director shows a remarkable sensitivity in dealing with the delicate issue of the psychological balance of a teenager who has no moral tools and draws on the simple laws of life and death that she sees in the surrounding nature. She avoids a prosaic or moralistic tone and, in large part, the manipulation of the young protagonist. The oscillation between realism, with an excellent observation of the fauna and flora, and surreal and dreamlike motifs, turns out to be the most appropriate to create the highlight of the story. In fact, during the dramatic ending, Zefir seems to confuse reality and dreams. A further

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point to emphasise is the fine performances of the cast, which consists almost entirely of non-professional actors. Emin Alper (1974) directed an excellent first feature film: Tepenin ardi (Beyond the Hill) (2012). This is an unusual thriller because it interweaves family drama and black comedy with “revisionist western” and also offers horror elements. The story is set in a rural area in Anatolia and presents a portrait of a patriarchal family, with misunderstandings, secrets and the obsession of an enemy’s menace from outside. Faik (Tamer Levent) is a sixty-year-old man, former head of the State Forestry Service. After retirement, he is taking care of the lands owned by his family for generations and located in a beautiful valley surrounded by rocky hills. He devotes himself to raising goats and receives the help of Mehmet (Mehmet Özgür), a sharecropper who lives in the farmhouse with his wife Meyrem (Banu Fotocan) and their young son Suleyman (SercanGümüú). It is a beautiful summer, but the protagonist is constantly tense and distressed because he is convinced that some “nomads” – who are never shown in the course of the film – are trespassing into his property and grazing their goats. One day his son Nusret (Reha Özcan) and his grandchildren, Zafer (Berk Hakman) and Caner (Furkan Berk Kiran) come from the city to visit him. The sixteen-year-old Caner is fascinated by the grandfather's rifle. Zafer, on the other hand, was mentally traumatized during his military service and, even in the peaceful surroundings, is tormented by visions of

Figure 3.1:Tepenin ardi (Beyond the Hill) (2012), by Emin Alper

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his comrades during guerrilla-fighting missions. As the hours pass, tensions arise. Faik blames Nusret for failing to educate his children and reminds Mehmet that he is late with the payment of the tenant farmer’s fee. Everyone seems careless and impulsive at the same time, but also unable to understand each other’s views. Then, having slaughtered a goat, the family organizes a night-time barbecue and fall asleep outdoors. During the night gunfire is heard and small incidents happen, but the truth of the facts, which involve some of the participants, is concealed by omissions and lies. At dawn Faik’s paranoia is at its height. Despite obvious contradictions, the blame for what happened is attributed to the external enemy. Only Meyrem seems to objectively observe the situation, but the male characters ignore her words. The deliberate choice of the director is to build an intelligent allegory with a strong meaning. In fact, he declared that a substantial part of the Turkish traditional “common sense” concerns the irrational fear of the other, of the different. The film provides a clear and chilling depiction of a microcosm morally suspended by its own contradictions and is strongly influenced by cultural prejudices. The narration is multifaceted and slowly builds up reasons and details. The tension grows gradually, combining unsettling calm and threatening surprise, thanks to skilful framing and editing. Alper effectively uses some genre conventions to build an atmosphere of mystery and a feeling of constant danger. He highlights the dynamics of hegemony and abuses of power in a patriarchal and authoritarian society, whose members are both perpetrators and victims. His writing and his perspective are subtly critical, without ever degenerating into didacticism or banal psychology. Awarded the Special Jury Prize at Venice Film Festival, Alper’s second feature film, Abluka (Frenzy) (2015), is an intense psycho-social drama-thriller set in Istanbul in an ambiguous and near-apocalyptic landscape. Alper moves from his first work’s rural spaces to the metropolis, but coherently uses once again some genre conventions to build an atmosphere of mystery and paranoia. He deliberately depicts an oppressive parable of a society brought to heel by its fear of terrorism. Even if the story seems to unfold in a timeless atmosphere of either the future or a potential present, echoes of the current situation of lack of democracy in Turkey clearly emerge. The location is an unknown and unnamed shantytown on the outskirts of Istanbul. The town is in the grip of political violence. The state uses new underground techniques in the hunt for terrorists. Having served 20 years in prison, Kadir (Mehmet Ozgur) is released on parole provided he does the state a service. After training, which enables him to identify potential threats in people’s rubbish, he works as a garbage collector to search for traces of bomb-

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making. He is posted to his former neighbourhood, where his younger brother Ahmet (Berkay Ates) works for the city as a stray dog exterminator. Ahmet’s wife recently fled with their children, leaving the lonely man slightly unhinged. The news is full of terrorist attacks, while not-so-distant explosions create increasing fear. Despite Kadir’s repeated efforts, Ahmet seems reluctant to develop a deep brotherly bond. Escalating pressure from the authorities creates suspicion and mistrust. More and more police are entering the neighbourhood, setting up street barriers. The district feels increasingly empty of inhabitants and under siege. As it becomes obvious that Ahmet is avoiding him, Kadir concocts conspiracy theories to explain his behaviour. There is no escape from the suffocating sensory feeling of persecution that can turn friends into enemies. Their frenzied paranoia can only lead to destruction. The director chooses to construct a radical allegory with a strong political and social resonance. In fact, he declared that the film tells how the political system turns “little men” into parts of its violent mechanism by providing them with authority and the instruments of violence, which in the end turn against themselves. Alper puts the audience into a disturbing state of uncertainty in which two brothers – one a paroled convict secretly recruited to ferret out terrorists, the other hired to kill stray dogs – are swallowed up by a vortex of state-sponsored distrust. It is not only the plot and the structure of the film, which mix reality and nightmare until it becomes difficult to tell them apart while the action is happening; the cinematography and sound of the film also tangibly create an acute sense of psychic claustrophobia, thanks to the steely grey and darkened tonalities and inescapable banging noises and alarms. Seyfi Teoman (1977-2012) was one of the founders of the Mithat Alam Film Centre, at the Bo÷aziçi University in Istanbul, a cultural centre with an adjoining library. He debuted with Tatilki tabi (Summer Book) (2008), which is both a family drama and a coming-of-age film. This film depicts the life of a family living in Silifke, a provincial town in the Mediterranean region. Teoman portrays a microcosm of feelings and conflicting expectations. During a hot summer, Mustafa, a small farmer and a hard worker, is struck by a brain haemorrhage and falls into a coma. The tragic event occurred while he was on a business trip. More than that, the money he carried with him has disappeared. Hasan, Mustafa’s younger brother, discriminated by the family because he divorced, is a butcher. He does not hesitate to take over the business and to care for his disoriented relatives. He reassures his sister-in-law Güler about her husband's fidelity. Then he convinces Veysel, his oldest nephew, to continue to attend the Military Academy, instead of studying business

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administration. He also defends Ali, his ten-year-old nephew, who is being bullied. The narrative is minimalist, but very fluid. The meditative atmosphere and the excellent performance of the cast, which also includes non-actors, are entirely convincing. Teoman then directed Bizim büyük çaresizli÷imiz (Our Grand Despair) (2011), a romantic comedy adapted from a novel by Bariú Biçakçi. The protagonists of the story, which covers a period of several months – from autumn to spring – are Ender and Çetin, two thirty-year-old bachelors. The two friends share a comfortable modern flat. One day, a close friend of theirs asks to host his sister Nihal, a college student recently hit by a serious family bereavement: the loss of both parents, in a car accident. At first, the young woman shows very little communication and makes the two friends, who are rather clumsy and inexperienced, feel uncomfortable. However, with the passage of time, she overcomes her grief and proves to be intelligent, sensitive and lively. Gradually, both Ender and Çetin fall in love with Nihal, showing their immaturity in romantic relationships. Moreover, both are torn by different drives: a feeling of protectiveness towards the young woman that impedes the emergence of an attraction on other grounds; the fear of offending their common friend, Nihal’s brother; the fear of irrevocably spoiling their mutual friendship and their established “familiar coexistence.” The film shows the interactions of this unusual trio through sketches that are sometimes touching and sometimes comic. The ending is unresolved, as Nihal decides to leave the apartment because she now feels ready for a truly independent life. The most interesting aspect of the film is undoubtedly provided by its setting in the capital, Ankara, a rather unusual location compared to other films of the Turkish “nouvelle vague” of the last decade. The city itself emerges as an additional protagonist of the story, thanks to Teoman’s distinctive documentary gaze that reveals, above all, the meeting places and the rituals of the generations of the petty bourgeois and intellectual youths in their twenties and thirties. Teoman largely avoids the most common romantic clichés, but the psychological and existential features of the characters are weak and debatable. The film appears to be inadequate from the dramatic point of view, because while it claims to demonstrate the difficulty of approaching adulthood, it fails to do justice to the complexity of the issue. Mahmut Fazil Coúkun (1973) debuted with Uzak ihtimal (Wrong Rosary) (2009), a magnificent drama, direct and touching, which is constructed as a highly emotional thriller. The film, set in present-day Istanbul, is extraordinarily rich in documentary and ethological details. The director composes a puzzle of sensuality, love, friendship and pain,

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without being either rhetorical or banal. The protagonist is Musa (Nadir Saribacak), a muezzin in his thirties coming from Ankara, who was assigned to a mosque in the old quarter of Galata. The religious authority places him in a small apartment inside an old building. Musa diligently performs the tasks that keep him busy, since the early hours of the morning, in the mosque. However, being educated and curious, he is fascinated by the cultural diversity of the city. Therefore, as soon as he can, he wanders in his civilian clothes on the banks of the Bosphorus and in the narrow streets overlooked by the neighbourhood’s shops. But an unexpected encounter deeply affects him. One day, shortly after his arrival, he meets, on the landing of the house, Clara (Görkem Yeltan), a twenty-year-old woman, refined, delicate and vaguely melancholy who turns out to be a Catholic nun who lives in the apartment next to his, taking care of the old and ailing Sister Anna. Musa, promptly fascinated by the behaviour and the shy personality of the young woman, begins to spy on her and to follow her. In short he discovers that she is a lay sister who works in a nearby church, waiting to take her final vows. In the same church, the muezzin meets Yacup (Ersan Uysal), an elderly Muslim bibliophile, owner of an old library. The two get along and Musa agrees to help the old bookseller to arrange and translate ancient texts of the Ottoman era. Actually, Yacup suffers because he knows that he is the unknown father of Clara, but he does not dare reveal himself to the young woman. Musa is hesitant in confessing the truth to himself, but he gradually acknowledges his deep affection for Clara. Coúkun describes, with an unhurried pace and a delicate tone, the relationship that is established between these three lonely souls. It is a fragile bond that materializes in fleeting community moments, but that does not solve inequalities and contradictions. The bitter ending is carried out without emphasis. The film deals with a complex subject: the relations between different religious traditions and the Western influences in contemporary Turkey and, more specifically, in a large modern and multicultural city. Yet Coúkun avoids the polarity between the sacred and the profane and, above all, any moral judgment. He favours interior spaces (the small apartments, the mosque, the church, the library) and even his outdoor shooting seeks the dark and narrow streets and the dim corners, during the transition between winter and spring, with its misty atmospheres. This is a world in which dignity and vague desolation are entwined. What emerges is a quiet but extremely intense atmosphere, where the silences, the limited dialogues and the exchanges of glances assume great significance, reminiscent of the cinema of Kiéslowski. The quality of the film is completed by well-calibrated static shots and by some slow sequence

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shots, by expert editing and by a direction of the actors that allows for effective low-key performances. Coúkun’s next film, Yozgat Blues (2013), offers a dramatic portrait of the sorrowful existential journey of a man, from the metropolis to the province. It is a work that describes the impossibility of a loving relationship in the presence of a cultural gap and an emotional rupture. The protagonist is Yavuz (Ercan Kesal), a fifty-year-old performer of songs from the 1970s and of the motifs of the classic French chansonniers. His career in Istanbul is passing through a phase of irreversible decline. In fact, even if he knows well the environment of the popular entertainment, and not disdaining the more or less legitimate tricks of the trade, he is now reduced to sad performances in shopping malls. Fortunately, he also teaches in a music and singing course offered for free by the municipality. The thirty-year-old Neúe (Ayça Damgaci), who works as a promoter of products in supermarkets, is a very gifted student of his. She is a plump, simple and naive woman, driven by a sincere admiration for the teacher. One day Yavuz receives a promising job offer: a contract to perform in the restaurant ballroom of best hotel in Yozgat, a town in central Anatolia, east of Ankara. Despite being naturally suspicious, hypochondriac and obsessed with his appearance, he decides to bring Neúe with him to use her as a stooge during his shows. Later the two settle in Yozgat and begin working together happily. At the same time, they experience a strange cohabitation in the apartment made available to them. Yavuz expects to be treated with due respect, but he must face an indifferent and bored public, who, by contrast, appreciates the presence of the female singer. Gradually, Yavuz comes to an ambivalent relationship with Neúe: he feels professional jealousy and, at the same time, sentimental attraction, even without having the courage to declare it. However, he realises that he is emotionally dependent on the support of a woman that he does not consider at his level, but who is always in a good mood and optimistic. But Neúe, who in the meantime has become more attractive and determined, bonds progressively with Sabri (Tansu Biçer), a kind thirtyyear-old barber who looks after the hairpiece which hides Yavuz’s baldness. This young man also enlivens a local radio station that promotes pop concerts. Gradually, Neúe chooses an independent life: she becomes Sabri’s girlfriend and the new star of the local music scene. Eventually, Yavuz is deserted and must sadly resign himself to an uncertain future. This is a mature film, from which the following characteristics emerge: a convincing setting, a minimalist narration, not without moments of pathos and fine irony, a close examination of the characters and of their relationships, and an excellent direction of the actors.

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Pelin Esmer (1972) made, as her debut film, 11’e 10 kala (10 to 11) (2009): a work with a fictional plot that expands one of her previous documentaries. It is an existential drama that focuses on the contrast and the tension between progress and memory. The protagonist is the elderly Mr. Mithat (Mithat Esmer). Since 1950 Mithat has devoted himself to a monumental challenge: collecting all sorts of objects that had, in his opinion, an intellectual or aesthetic value. To this end, he has gradually filled his apartment with newspapers, books, magazines, postcards, watches, souvenirs, but also gadgets and scientific instruments of all kinds. This heap of junk, carefully catalogued, fills rooms and corridors of his home, on the fourth floor of the decent Emnyet Apartment Building, in an old residential neighbourhood of Istanbul. Mithat’s mania for collecting has led to a breakdown of his marriage. He travels tirelessly to visit little shops and merchants of the city in order to look for issues of magazines that are impossible to find or rare books or unique items that are needed to complete his countless “collections”. Moreover, since he has limited energies, he takes advantage of the cooperation of Ali (Nejat Iúler), the forty-year-old janitor of the building, who is willing, for a fee, to go to his various suppliers. Ali is also one of the few who are allowed to access the apartment-museum. One day the assembly of the apartments’ owners, who always considered Mr. Mithat an annoyance, tells him that, given the seismic risk burden on the city and in order to value the building, it has been decided to demolish the old building and to rebuild it with antiseismic criteria. Therefore the two men, the old collector and Ali find themselves alone in the building. Gradually, Mr. Mithat will involve the illiterate janitor in the concern for the fate of the “collections”, until a sad and ironic conclusion. The quality of the film lies in the careful construction of the characters, without heavy-handedness. Also notable is the detailed depiction of urban life and of the relationships between middle-class residents, with bright and refined documentary aspects. Esmer subsequently directed Gözetleme kulesi (Watchtower) (2013), a drama that describes an unusual and tormented male/female relationship. The story takes place in the province, in an area of wooded hills. Nihat (Olgun ùimúek) is a thirty-year-old man, terse and crippled by guilt. In fact he suffered a terrible tragedy: he was driving his car when his wife and daughter died in an accident. Therefore, he is happy to accept a job as a forest ranger fire lookout, because this is a job that isolates him in an observation tower lost in the forest. The twenty-year-old Seher (Nilay Erdönmez) has been the victim of sexual abuse by one of her uncles. After becoming pregnant, she is forced to leave her village and she finds a job as a waitress at a tavern frequented by truck drivers passing through. She

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Figure 3.2: Köprüdekiler (Men on the Bridge) (2009), by Asli Özge

hides her pregnancy, until the day when she gives birth, with great pain, in her room. Desperate, she wanders exhausted, until she encounters Nihat who helps and takes her to his observation tower. The two will try to live together away from the world. This film undoubtedly represents a critique of the violence of patriarchal society. It presents an interesting study of characters and a realistic depiction, but unfortunately it contains some dramatic elements that are too prosaic, obvious and lacking in credibility. Asli Özge (1975) debuted with Köprüdekiler (Men on the Bridge) (2009), a film that offers a distinctive portrait of Istanbul and of people who fear an uncertain future. A hybrid of fiction and documentary, this film tells real-life stories, recasting them. The three main characters live in the suburbs and work in the city centre. Every day, like millions of others, they cross the Bosporus Bridge, the historic crossing that connects the European and the Asian side of the city and the country. Fikret is 17 years old and sells roses illegally to car drivers queued on the bridge during rush hours. Then, he looks for work in the old quarters of the centre. Umut is a 28-year-old taxi driver. He is looking to rent a new apartment to please his demanding wife, victim of consumerism. Murat is a 24-year-old policeman for traffic control. He recently moved from a small town in eastern Anatolia. Every evening, after hours of unsatisfactory work, he surfs the internet, using chat lines, to find a girlfriend. The three protagonists are trapped between alienated realities and vain hopes. The film depicts various episodes, dramatic or otherwise, through the eyes of the protagonists – who are not acting, but playing themselves – and it

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offers an open conclusion. The narrative rhythm is slow, but engaging. The bridge takes on a twofold symbolic meaning: a negative one, because it witnesses the division of people and cultures, and a positive one, that refers to the attempt to cross the border between reality and fiction. Özge’s next film, Hayatboyu (Lifelong) (2013), is a problematic and unresolved existential drama. It is about the marriage breakdown of a couple of intellectual and wealthy people in their fifties. The story takes place in autumn and proceeds slowly, accumulating and emphasizing episodes and situations. Ela (Defne Halman) is a famous plastic artist. Her husband Can (Hakan Cimenser) is a well-known architect. They live in a beautiful house, designed by Can, with large windows and cool modern furniture, in a residential district of Istanbul. Their union is based on collaboration and mutual respect, but at the sentimental level there is dryness and a lack of sexual interest. One day Ela overhears, by chance, a telephone conversation of her husband’s and starts to suspect that he is unfaithful. The stress of the woman increases because she also has to face the preparation of a new important exhibition of her works. Despite the fact that the couple continues to show unity in front of friends and even when they receive a visit from their daughter, a progressive rift is developing between them. However, they do not seem capable of either solving their problems or of separating. The director creates a minimalist and subtle behavioural study of bourgeois discomfort, with vague reminiscences of Antonioni’s cinema. She provides a valuable stylization of images, austere widescreen shots, highly calibrated takes and highquality photography. Nevertheless, the narrative proceeds awkwardly, showing both inconsistencies and predictable developments. Besides, the emotional tension between the protagonists appears largely artificial and the most dramatic sequences are not very original and not entirely credible. Social status, hypocrisy, the need to keep up appearances and the lack of communication are represented almost out of context and could relate to characters who live in any other western metropolis. Selim Evci (1975), also a photographer and founder of the IFSAK Short Film Workshop, made his debut with Iki çizgi (Two Lines) (2008), a provocative portrait of the crisis of a twenty-year-old bourgeois couple living in Istanbul. Cultured, fashionable and wealthy, Mert (Kaan Keskin) and Selin (Gülçin Santircio÷lu) live together without being married. They reside in a carefully furnished apartment in a residential area of the city. He is a photographer, whereas she is an executive in a commercial company. Their relationship goes on wearily, with lack of conversation and perfunctory sex. Mert is presumptuous and loves to spy on the young women he crosses in the street, but he is unable to manage the small daily

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tasks. Selin works a lot in the office and alternates between tolerant passivity and aggressiveness. When summer comes, they go on a holiday, wandering on the beaches of the Aegean Sea. But the tension between them is not resolved and leads to tragicomic episodes: he tries banal conversations while she suffers and becomes uncommunicative. The same magnificent seascape takes up disturbing and claustrophobic connotations. Then one night they decide to embark on a daring role-play: Selin pretends to be a prostitute and Mert takes the part of a rough gas station attendant. At first, they seem to infuse new energy in their relationship, but the final price will be very high. The film is convincing in presenting the problematic nature of a condition of conflicting identities and existential paralysis, between an attempt to assimilate the Western modern values of emancipation and the persistence of traditional legacies related to machismo and to alleged female virtue. The narration, largely detached, turns out to be effective, despite some mismanaged dramatic excesses. The new film by Evci, Rüzgarlar (Winds) (2013), is more meditative and intimate, but with less resolution. It explores knowledge and cultural diversity. Murat (Yusuf Nejat Buluz) is a sound engineer who lives in Istanbul. Being passionate about photography, he goes to the island of Gökçeada (Imvros for the Greeks), the largest in Turkey, which is located in the Aegean Sea at the entrance of the Dardanelles strait. His purpose is to organize an exhibition of photos of the island. The protagonist comes then into contact with the small community of Greek ethnic residents. In particular, he establishes a bond of friendship with an octogenarian lady and her granddaughter and he records the conversations he has with them, salvaging their family history. After directing short films and documentaries, Belmin Söylemez (1966) made her feature debut with ùimdiki zaman (Present Tense) (2012), a remarkable minimalist film that offers a sensitive and authentic portrait of the female existential problems in the context of urban solitude. The story takes place in Istanbul during a gloomy spring. Mina (Samen Öge) is 28 years old and is a lonely woman. She is unhappy, divorced and unemployed, and is looking for a home. At the beginning of the film, she manages to settle in a temporarily abandoned apartment in an old building. She makes it cosy, but she is conscious of the possibility of being evicted. At the same time she dreams of emigrating to the United States to start a new life, but she needs a work stabilization and money in order to get a visa. One day, after reading an ad, she manages to find work as a fortuneteller in a café in the old town. Actually, she lies and fails to say that she has no experience in the field. Rather, she tries to guess the existential problems of young or mature women, demonstrating an apparently good

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psychological acumen. Moreover, her predictions are the result of her imagination and of a skilled mediation between the expectations of customers and her own personal experience, including her desires and frustrations. Over time she develops a controversial friendship with Fazi (ùenay Aydin), the other fortune-teller who works in the café. She must also deal with the advances of Tayfun (Ozan Bilen), the young, dashing café owner. This film is full of atmosphere and is quite credible in its representation of contemporary reality. Its excellent indoor shots and cinematography that makes the most of light and semi-darkness are its quality elements. Seren Yüce (1975), past collaborator of Yeúim Ustao÷lu and Fatih Akin, debuted with Ço÷unluk (Majority) (2010). It is a drama, set in Istanbul, offering a lucid representation of a family environment and, more generally, of the interpersonal relationships in Turkish society. This society is presented as blocked by its own contradictions and strongly influenced by the cultural prejudices which are widespread in the population. It is a film that highlights the longstanding dominance of the patriarchal family model, characterised by paternal authoritarianism and by the most inveterate male chauvinism. At the centre of the story is a well-off middle-class family. The protagonist is Mertkan (Bartu Küçükça÷layan), a twenty-one-year-old boy, stout and clumsy, sensitive but lacking in determination. Mertkan, who has left school, lives with his fifty-year-old parents in a comfortable apartment. The dominant figure of the family is his father Kemal (Jetter Tanriö÷en), a small building contractor, hard, austere and determined. He is the archetypal self-made man who abhors culture and is fully convinced that what counts the most is respectability and economic well-being. Mertkan works in the company office of his father, who entrusts him with irrelevant tasks and regularly monitors his activities. This young man, during his free time, wanders the city with a couple of friends. They hang out at bars, gaming halls, shopping centres and nightclubs. It is a basically stable and routine life, but also meaningless, because it doesn’t offer true emotions or passions. One day Mertkan meets Gül (Essue Madra), a young Kurdish student, who supports herself working in a fast food restaurant. Gradually, despite an initial reluctance, a fragile love affair takes shape between the two. However, when Kemal finds out that his son is dating a Kurdish girl, despite not knowing her, he takes a position against their relationship, by appealing to nationalist and chauvinist principles. Mertkan, who had also started to behave with greater independence, fails to object to his father’s personality. His fear drives him to submit again to his father's will and to break the relationship with Gül. Meanwhile, Kemal sends him to direct a

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peripheral construction site managed by his company. The young man is forced to take responsibility, and gradually comes to acquire a behaviour that is more in keeping with the standards of traditional machismo. The final sequence of the film is emblematic: the family is gathered for dinner and Metkan tells his father, who is visibly pleased, about his new work experience in a leading role. However, anxiety is clearly noticeable behind the flaunted self-confidence of this young man. It seems clear that none of the contradictions of the family members has been resolved. The film carefully describes the complex father-son relationship and the subordinate

Figure 3.3: Ço÷unluk (Majority) (2010), by Seren Yüze

role of the mother. It pushes the viewer to observe the behavioural dynamics, juxtaposing patterns and details. Yüce explores issues as latent discrimination, prejudice, hidden violence, identity crisis, and the subcultural entrapment. But he also shows the disguised dynamics of hegemony and abuse of power, and the promotion of what is accepted as “natural behaviour,” thus appropriate for “the majority.” The film’s perspective is subtly critical, without ever degenerating into didacticism. In addition, the documentary-style attention to the varied urban architecture can be read as an effective metaphor for the complexity of life.

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Deniz Akçay Katiksiz (1981) made her debut with Köksüz (Nobody’s Home) (2012), a drama full of nuances. The story is about a middle-class family in today’s Istanbul. Nurcan (Lale Baúar) is a frustrated fifty-yearold woman, unable to get over the death of her husband. She spends most of her time at home, dividing it among the meticulous cleaning of the apartment, other household chores and the obsessive watching of television serials. With regard to her three children, she shows a mix of apprehension and a continued demand for involvement in practical problems: essentially she seeks her self-assurance through their presence. Feride (Ahu Türkpençe), the thirty-two-year-old daughter, works in an office, but she must constantly be available to meet the needs of her mother who treats her as the head of the family and ignores her need to be independent. ølker (Savaú Alp Baúar), the sixteen-year-old son, attends school reluctantly and prefers to smoke joints. He rejects the authority of his mother and older sister and settles in a friend’s home, starting an affair with his friend’s lonely mother. Özge (Melis Ebeler), the youngest daughter, often ignored by everyone, tries to give back trust to her mother. She witnesses quarrels and tensions, also because, in the meantime, her brother has come back home. The situation continues until Feride, unable to bear further the possessive selfishness of her mother, agrees to marry Güla÷a (Sekvan Serinkaya), an office co-worker a little older than her, obliging and helpful, although she is not really in love. Nurcan first tries to dissuade her, telling her that the future son-in-law would not be a good catch. Then, she addresses him, predicting an unhappy future with Feride. But in the end she has to accept the official engagement, despite her feelings of jealousy and fear of separation. Katiksiz conceived a credible narrative. Her approach is fresh and sharp and she avoids the dangerous drift of psychoanalytic complications. While presenting some stereotyped situations and some grotesque or bitter humorous excess, the film clearly frames the prejudices of the petty-bourgeois mentality. The characters are well drawn and the narration develops with a convincing dramatic pace, punctuated by effective and meaningful contingent episodes. Katiksiz herself declared that this is a story of people who cannot define their roles, so they awkwardly try to play the roles that were determined for them, and thus they damage each other in everyday practice. Iksen Baúarir (1978) debuted with Baúka dilde aúk (Love in Another Language) (2009), an unpretentious romantic comedy, with a fluid narration and some poetic touches. It describes the love story between two twenty-year-olds: Onur (Mert Firat), a handsome young man who has been deaf-mute from birth, and Zeynep (Saadet Iúil), an attractive woman who works in a call centre. With its protagonists caught between prejudgement

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and trust, the film explores the desire for communication and its obstacles. Baúarir’s next film, Atlikarinca (Merry-go-round) (2010), is a family drama with the central theme of incest. A well-constructed and interesting, and at times moving film, set in a small provincial town, it tells the story of an apparently normal middle-class family formed by Erdem (Mert Firat), an employee and aspiring writer, his wife Sevil (Nergis Öztürk) and their teenage children Edip (Sercan Badur) and Sevgi (Semra Çeyrekbaúi). After Sevil’s mother suffers a stroke, they are forced to move to Istanbul. Ten years later, Edip has left home to study, while Sevgi appears increasingly indifferent and unhappy and shows abrupt mood swings. Given the silence of her daughter, Sevil begins to wonder about the possible causes of those behaviours. Erdem then dies in an accident and the dark secrets of the family gradually emerge. Alpgiray M. U÷urlu (1983) directed his first feature film, Uvertür (Overture) (2013), an existential drama that deals with delicate moral dilemmas. Atif (Burat Türker) is a thirty-year-old pharmaceutical representative, experienced, conscientious and hard-working. He lives in Istanbul, in an apartment with his elderly mother, a woman chronically ill and permanently bedridden. Every day Hanife (Özgen Gönan), a young trusted nurse, assists the woman. Atif initially seems satisfied with her work. But on one occasion he harshly blames her because he thinks that she neglected her duty of care. Since that moment, the relations between the employer and the nurse start deteriorating. Later Atif finds a letter containing the last will of his mother. Then, he meets both his brother and sister to discuss about it, but they prove to be unconcerned. From that moment on, Atif is increasingly irritated and puzzled, but he hides his suffering. One night he realizes that his mother is wheezing. At that point he decides to carry out an extreme act. This film, through its protagonist, presents an incisive human portrait, exploring the tension between conformity and the need for liberation. Long dialogues that reveal the discomfort of the characters punctuate the narrative. The film is also notable for its dynamic editing and distinctive photography, which, with a narrow range of dark tones, perfectly captures the autumn urban landscape. Erdem Tepegöz (1982) debuted with Zerre (The Particle) (2012), a dramatic female portrait characterised by a convincing realist approach and some well-balanced documentary elements. It tells the story of Zeynep (Jale Arkan), a textile worker in her thirties who, being separated from her husband, lives in Istanbul in the slum of Tarlabaú, in a miserable accommodation, which she shares with her elderly mother (Rüçhan Çaliúkur) and with her young daughter (Dilay Demrok). One day she gets

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fired. In addition, she has to deal with the demands of the landlord who requires the payment of the rent. Forced to accept temporary, mediocre and poorly paid jobs, Zeynep suffers the struggle of commuting, schedules and heavy tasks, humiliations and gross sexual advances. Later on, her daughter gets ill and Zeynep’s situation becomes desperate. The film debates with no rhetoric the issue of unemployment and presents plausible locations and characters. Despite some melodramatic excesses, the narrative develops with confidence. The indoor shots, together with a photography that favours grey and dark tones, powerfully convey the suffocating and bitter existence of a strong, but hopelessly disadvantaged woman. After making his debut with Canavarlar sofrasi (The Monster’s Dinner) (2011), a surreal, provocative, rather pretentious thriller, Ramin Matin (1977) directed Kusursuzlar (The Impeccables) (2013). This is the multifaceted portrait of the complex relationship between two sisters in their thirties, both graduates and professionals, belonging to the Istanbul’s middle class. The story begins with the arrival of Lale (Ipek Türktan Kaynak) and Yasemin (Esra Bezen Bilgin) in the summerhouse owned by their grandmother, where they used to go during childhood. It’s May, at the beginning of the bathing season, in Çeúme, on the Aegean coast. Apparently the two are spending a quiet holiday in idyllic locations, between lazy days at the beach and quiet evenings at home. However, little by little, disagreements and tensions arise. Lale does not like to show her body and, behind her nervousness and shyness, she hides an unclear anguish that borders on paranoia. She blames her sister for having settled abroad for five years and having ceased to communicate during that long period. Yasemin is very self-assured and confident on her ability to seduce males. It emerges that Lale has recently discontinued the relationship with her boyfriend, and now she fears that he may be pursuing her. In the end it is revealed that her fears are related to an incident of severe violence that she suffered, although the circumstances remain ambiguous. This drama, with thriller elements, portrays a tangle of mixed feelings – the results of a traumatic event and of a secret in the past – that determine the behaviour of the protagonists in the present. Both characters are conscious of those feelings, but the one is obsessed by them, while the other wants to remove them for good. The relationship between them is emotionally turbulent, combining love and hatred, competition and solidarity, rivalry and understanding. Thanks to a well-written script, Matin develops the narrative through very significant dialogues, avoiding any psychologising and easy dramatic solutions. Some overacting excesses in the key parts of the film are the only negative element.

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Emine Emel Balci (1984) debuted with Nefesin kesilene kadar (Until I Lose My Breath) (2015), a controversial intimate drama about the relationship between a working-class father and daughter. Serap (Esme Madra) is an immature motherless teenager, neither pretty nor pleasant, who works as a runner in a textile factory in Istanbul. She lives with her sister and her husband, who both treat her badly. Serap longs for her father (Riza Akin), a long-distance truck driver, to finally rent a flat for the two of them. Serap does everything she can to make sure her wish comes true, saving her wages, lying and even stealing. Her stubborn perseverance reverses the standard parent-child relationship: in fact she obsessively looks after her father, giving him money and presents. But the man always comes up with new excuses, lies to her and is clearly not interested in being tied down. Balci depicts a kind of heroine, equal parts naïve, grotesque, spiteful and revengeful, showing her emotional dependence on a largely absent, cynical and reticent father. She is a mixed-up character who lacks the skills to even sustain a friendship and who acts with senselessness and malice. Despite an interesting portrait of a laboring working-class trying to get by on the miserable fringes of Istanbul, the film is unconvincing because it lacks a real sense of drama, proposes some unbelievable circumstances, and makes the protagonist absolutely onedimensional, denying her anything but destructive agency. Moreover, Balci chooses to keep the camera constantly on Serap, in order to conceive a way of forcing viewer identification. This shot-from-the-back-of-thehead aesthetic with a mobile handheld camera, an unoriginal imitation borrowed from the Dardenne Brothers and so common in recent indie cinema all over the world, produces a forced proximity, feels oppressive, and does not enhance intensity. Ultimately this is why the film fails as a story of alienation and loneliness, and is, instead, a tale of a victim of her own dullness, violating the director’s intention to critique the present society and traditional concepts of gender and family in Turkey. Senem Tüzen (1980) made her feature debut with Ana Yurdu (Motherland) (2015), an existential drama centred on the subject of mother-daughter relationships. Nesrin (Esra Bezeb Bilgin) is a 30-year-old urban, middle-class woman, recovering from a divorce. Motherhood has passed her by so far, and she is tormented by rancour and lost expectations and uncertain about her future. She has quit her office job and abandoned her house in Istanbul, and comes to the village house of her deceased grandmother to try to finish a novel and thereby live out her childhood dream of being a writer. When her conservative and increasingly unhinged mother Halise (Nihal Koldas) turns up unexpectedly and uninvited and refuses to leave, Nesrin’s writing stalls. Her fantasies of village life turn

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bitter as the two women are forced to confront the darker corners of each other’s inner worlds. On the one hand, Halise knows her way around and is in her element in the communal and deeply religious surroundings of the town: she gets on well with her female neighbours and resorts to rituals and traditions in order to solve problems. Nesrin, on the other hand, feels as though she is suffocating in that same environment. She is striving to assert herself and finds a friend in an “outcast” who is reviled by the locals. Motherland offers an interesting portrait of a woman torn apart by love and hatred for her mother, and struggling to reconcile the same cultural schisms that divide modern Turkey. Tüzen’s stated aim is to explore the nature of the mother-daughter relationship and of a difficult, painful conflict. She manages to avoid didacticism, exploring the complexities of the context as a means to further comment on the clash of communitarianism and modernity in present-day Turkey. Unfortunately, the narrative is convoluted and not particularly original, full of clichés and intellectualist provocations and psychological patterns which appear unconvincing. Despite efforts to build an intense dramatic charge through the two main characters’ fraught cohabitation, the tension is only intermittently effective. However, with cinematography that focuses on natural lighting, dark and tight spaces, the aesthetic is notable, though not without a rather voyeuristic inflection. Mustafa Kara (1980) directed his second feature film, Kalandar So÷u÷u (Cold of Kalandar) (2015), which is a thoughtfully constructed slow-burning parable of rural life. This is both a vivid anthropological portrait of a dirt-poor family desperately trying to make a living in the mountains of Northern Turkey, above the Black Sea, and also a metaphor for stubborn dreamers who never give up hope of finding a shortcut in life for restoring personal identity and economic conditions. Kara fashions an intense tale of poverty and persistence, with palpable realism and a documentary sensibility: in fact, there seems to be no distinction between truth and fiction in this film. 40-year-old Mehmet (Haydar Sisman) lives with his two children, Ibrahim (Ibrahim Kuvvet) and Mustafa (Temel Kara), his wife Hanife (Nuray Yesilaraz), and his elderly mother-in-law in a mountain village near the Black Sea. His decrepit mountain hovel is very isolated, in a natural setting far from modern civilization. He makes a living by breeding a few animals, cows and goats, while looking for a mineral reserve, with great passion and hope. However, his endless pursuit is perceived as futile and useless by his exhausted and despairing wife. Instead of listening to his wife and selling their prize bull to pay back some of his countless debts, he keeps prospecting the craggy mountains, searching for veins of valuable metals that might justify opening a mine

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there. Winter season is approaching and Mehmet roams the mountains for days, climbing higher and higher, despite mist, rain and snow. Destroyed by vain efforts, his hope is renewed with the news of a competition with significant prize money distributed to the winners. In order to attend the bullfight held in Artvin, Mehmet dedicates his time to training the bull in the stable until the day of the competition. But he returns from Artvin completely lost, once again. Nature and people seem intrinsically united in Kara’s perception of their existence. Cold of Kalandar shows the struggles of hardship, and the relationship between nature, animals and human beings. The pace is very slow and the film comes to be overlong with quite a few repetitions. Brief scenes of dialogue are interspersed with lengthy scenes of people, mostly the family, just being and doing. It is contemplative, but with the spectacular landscape, exquisitely photographed by Cevahir ùahin and Kürúat Üresin, and with a strong, remarkable performance by Haydar Sisman. The film evokes Semih Kaplano÷lu’s cinema, particularly the “Yusuf Trilogy”, with its minimalism and realism, poetic approach, slow dynamics, and visual aesthetics which are lyrical, intense and refined. Kara seems more radical than Kaplano÷lu, but also less convincing because the psychology of the characters does not come to the surface. While the inclusion of heartwarming exchanges, bull-training scenes, and fantastic elements prevents the film from being overly realistic it is unfortunate that a final sequence is unsettling and confusing: a hymn to a kind of divine providence and possible redemption. Ümit Koreken (1978) debuted with Mavi Bisiklet (Blue Bicycle) (2016) which is a children’s coming-of-age film. This is not only a drama about justice but also an honest representation of small-town rural society and primary school system in present-day Turkey. Ali, a timid and introverted 12-year-old boy, lives with his mother and sister in little town in the central Anatolia province of Konya’s Akúehir district. His mother sells the clothes that she knits on the streets, while he himself earns a little money on the side working in a tyre repair shop after school, and brings home his weekly wages. He saves the tips, however, for a higher goal: one day he will buy the beautiful brand new blue bicycle that he admires regularly in a shop window on his way home. Ali’s father was killed years before in a mysterious accident. He died while working on a farm, but his body was found on the railroad tracks. The only witness to the incident was Salim, the overseer at the farm, who blamed his father. But Ali and his mother know otherwise and have sued in court, determined to see justice done. The holiday is over. School has just started. Ali is very happy to see his platonic love Elif. She is an impeccable student, the bright girl in his class,

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and head prefect. Salim enrols his grandson Hasan in the school. As Elif has to care for her younger siblings, she partly neglects her duties as prefect, and soon the principal of the school gives Elif's title, and the honor to represent their school at an event in the capital, to Hasan, who is a member of a powerful and prominent family. Ali thinks that Elif was the victim of an unjust decision and decides to spend all his savings in order for justice to be done. He launches a passionate campaign with the help of his best friend Yusuf to win back the title for Elif. One night the town walls are covered with protest posters and hand-outs flutter down from the roof of the school building; the campaign finally reaches out to the media. Blue Bicycle offers a perspective on the concepts of injustice and righteousness through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy, who is sacrificing his dream in order to fight against the injustice that he witnesses. The film’s script, written by Köreken and Nursen Çetin, clearly stands out for combining children’s honest emotions with a combative, rebellious tone. Moreover, Koreken offers a genuine portrait of adult-child relationships, which is quite believable and realistic. He shows an acute sense of drama and avoids, almost always, didacticism and rhetorical tones. Apart from Turan Özdemir, a professional actress from many well-known films, the film features unexperienced locals playing the roles of the children as well as supporting parts. They were selected from neighbouring villages and took basic acting classes. Emre Konuk (1988) directed Çirak (The Apprentice) (2015), his debut film. This is a shrewd dark comedy, inspired by the everyday psychological problems in society. It successfully portrays the onset of obsessive anxiety disorder and compulsive behaviour in a 35-year-old bachelor, a simple man and obedient shop assistant. Alim (Hakan Atalay) has been working as a tailor’s apprentice to his old master, Yakub (Tugrul Çetiner), for 15 years. Obsessive and irrationally fearful, he hates to break out of his utterly monotonous and predictable routine and keeps living his life in extreme monotony. Every morning and evening he follows the same rituals. He opens the store in the mornings and either takes a nap or watches TV until his boss arrives. In the evenings, he goes home, carpooling with Kemal from the coffeehouse, who lives in the same district. Alim is a sensitive man who is overly influenced by other people's words and by the situations he encounters in life. One night, he watches the TV news when he hears that LPG cars are not safe and can easily catch fire. Since he uses taxies for his after-work commute due to the long distance, Alim starts to control which cabs he takes. Unfortunately, he finds a LPG system in every car he finds. To avoid using a vehicle, he decides to move to a new apartment closer to work. This minor change

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becomes a vital turning point in his life. In fact he starts a close friendship with his landlady (Çigdem Selisik Onat), an elderly woman who wise and optimistic. The Apprentice is a late coming-of-age film, exploring the tension between conformity and the desire for a new beginning, between the imagination of disasters and the harmless facts of life, and between neurotic disorders and the need for liberation. Konuk portrays an exquisite microcosm set up in a studio: a visual art piece, through film, full of remarkable details. His approach is fresh and incisive, inventive and sharp, and avoids the temptation of psychoanalytical complications. In fact, we know nothing about Alim’s past: rather we dive into the story in medias res. Moreover, Konuk brilliantly directs his excellent cast. The narrative is fluid, with a convincing humorous and dramatic pace, punctuated by melancholic and poetical touches. Esra Saydam and Nisan Da÷, young directors graduated from the Film Program of the Columbia University in New York, made their debut with Deniz Seviyesi (Things I Cannot Tell) (2014). It is a sentimental and simplistic drama, but one that includes some interesting implications. It is a rather novel film in new Turkish cinema, as it explores the existential impact of the legacy of the past on the middle-class youths who emigrated to the Western world, and who are now professionally established away from the country. The protagonist is Damla (Damla Sönmez), a woman in her twenties who has been living in New York for a long time, being well integrated in her work environment. Married to Kevin (Jacob Fishel), a good-natured American man who is deeply in love with her, and being in the sixth month of pregnancy, she decides to return to Turkey for a holiday. It is an opportunity to visit her cousin and to see for the last time her home on the Mediterranean coast, where she spent every summer of her youth, before it is put up for sale. However, she can find no peace in this charming place, or perhaps she is not looking for it. She relives the memories of the past and one day reunites with Burak (Ahmet Rifat Sungar), the boyfriend whom she suddenly abandoned, without any explanation, eight years earlier, when she moved to the United States. Burak is the darling of the beach: he solves problems and helps children in need. Moreover he is an experienced sailor and owns a trendy bar. Damla seeks a rapprochement, but he treats her coldly. Kevin is informed of his wife’s past and notices her melancholy and uncertainty. Soon afterwards the painful conclusion comes, in which Damla and Burak explain themselves definitively. While it may be true that this story has universal characteristics and could be set in any other country, its screenplay, written by the directors themselves, avoids the shallow simulation of possible models. The description of the context is quite original and the

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perspective on personal relationships, especially those between adults and children, is quite honest. The psychological characterization of the protagonists, although evincing an excessive empathy for Damla, avoids clichés, the dramatic timing seems convincing, and the photography and the editing are remarkable.

CHAPTER FOUR THE POLITICAL CINEMA

Several directors of the last generation have addressed issues that are directly political. Even if their films tell disturbing stories of repression and violence against opponents and pro-democracy activists and left-wing parties, made by the State apparatuses, the police, the judiciary and the prison system, these films are not mere propaganda pieces, but real existential dramas. They are works that explore events and different stages of the history of Turkey in the last 50 years: the military coup of 1980 with its tragic sequence of arrests and mass profiling, tortures, illegal executions and political dismissals, but also of economic crisis, unemployment, mass migration, both voluntary and forced, from the province to Istanbul, fear, apathy and de-politicization; the era of the “strong state” in the 1990s and the worker and student protests; the lacklustre present period with business scandals, corruption and intrigues that involve politicians and religious people of the Islamic confraternities. Therefore, analysis of the most significant political films is essential. Ça÷an Irmak (1970) directed Babam ve o÷lum (My Father and My Son) (2005), his third film, which has become a classic of Turkish cinema. It is a family and political drama that compares three generations. Sadik (Fikret Kuúkan) is an intelligent and curious young man who lives in a village, located in a rural area on the coast of the Aegean Sea. In 1980, at the time of the military coup, being a student of journalism in Istanbul and a left-wing political activist, he is imprisoned and tortured. Meanwhile, his wife dies during childbirth. In 1987 Sadik is released and must take care of his son Deniz. Seriously ill, he goes back to his father's farm to leave the boy there. Hüseyin (Çetin Tekindor), his elderly father, does not forgive him for his ruinous political militancy. However, later on, he discovers the truth about Sadik’s health. In the interim, young Deniz (Ege Tanman), accustomed to Istanbul, does not understand his grandfather’s strict and rigorous customs. This film is an honest work that manages to balance melodrama with a representation of the cultural and political context of the time in the province and in Istanbul.

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We must also mention Ömer U÷ur (1954), a veteran who made Eve Dönüú (Homecoming) (2006), the tragic story of the persecution of a young man who was not involved in politics. The protagonist, identified as a left-wing extremist militant, is arrested and tortured after the 1980 coup. This film has paved the way for the subsequent works of the young directors. Two other directors with television experiences, Sirri Süreyya Önder (1962), also a journalist and politician, and Muharrem Gülmez (1968) explored the same theme. They co-directed their first film, Beynelmilel (International) (2006), a tragicomic and bitter story that examines the impact of the coup on ordinary people. The story takes place in the city of Adiyaman, in south eastern Anatolia, and the protagonists are the violinist Abuzer (Cezmi Baskin), his daughter Gülendam (Özgü Namal) and her lover Haydar (Umut Kurt), a young revolutionary. After the ban on public performances imposed on street musicians, the military commander of the region hires Abuzer and his band to regularise them. The violinist, having appreciated, without knowing it, the communist anthem “The Internationale,” contained on a disc that his daughter was overhearing, uses it as a musical base to compose a march. The band learns to play it to receive some generals, in their visit to the city. But the consequences for the musicians are grievous. A black comedy, not lacking in dramatic aspects and bold emphases and with an excellent ironic finale, Beynelmilel is an example of a daring imaginary reworking of a dark historical period. In addition the film has been a significant box office success. More recently, Faruk Hacihafizo÷lu (1965) directed his first feature film, Kar korsanlari (Snow Pirates) (2014), an intense coming-of-age film set against the backdrop of the 1980 military coup. In Kars, the remote eastern Turkey’s small town, during a harsh cold winter, the people need coal for heating their homes, but the stock supplies are assigned only to a few state offices and privileged individuals. Three children, Serhat, Gurbuz and Ibo, are forced to scour the neighbourhoods for any other source of coal. They are largely unaware of the significance and threat of everything happening around them. But with soldiers seizing coal in the depths and patrolling the streets and the railway station, and things getting worse everyday, they have no choice but to deal with the grinding reality of life. Radio broadcasts and news bulletins in the background serve to keep the viewer appraised of the deteriorating political situation. Then there is the sight of political prisoners with paper bags over their heads, taken away in cars. Hacihafizo÷lu offers a genuine and quite rigorous portrait of the time of the military dictatorship, seen through the eyes of three 13-year-old boys. He carefully describes the difficult life within the

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families and, above all, he focuses on the boys’ own views and actions and their spirit of solidarity. Notwithstanding some effective moments of black humour, the film slowly ratchets up tension, avoiding any kind of rhetorical temptation and with a sparse use of music. The three young actors manage to bring to life a believable friendship and their characters’ unswerving sense of optimism. The work of two younger directors also addresses the coup. Atil Inaç (1972), made his debut with Zincirbozan (2007), a film that was unique at that time. In fact, it offers a clear and accurate reconstruction of the events that led to the coup, providing evidence of the months of preparation by the hierarchies of the army, the received political protections and the international manoeuvres of support. Thus it carefully documents the events of those days. The film opens with the murder of the journalist Abdi Ipekci and devotes ample attention to the detention and torture centres, including precisely the one of Zincirbozan at Çanakkale, where many political leaders of the opposition parties were imprisoned. Levent Semerci (1973), with his second film, Ayan Hanim (2014), opted for an experimental dramatic reconstruction of the turbulent 1970s, the coup of 1980 and the following years. At the centre of the film, set in Istanbul, is an ordinary middle-class family composed of Ayan Hanim (Vahide Gördüm), a fifty-year-old housewife, her husband Ahmet Bey (Selçuk Yöntem), a retired Army sergeant, and four children. Of these, only the youngest, who is still under 18, is not involved in the radical movements of opposition, while the other three are active part of them. They participated in the riots already in 1977. Then, after the coup, the disintegration of the family begins. The set design is exquisitely theatrical and also includes a stage reconstruction of Taksim Square. The narrative is a tragic saga that expresses all the pain of a mother who sees her children in danger and cannot save them. The mise-en-scène, visually impressive and very creative, alternates stylized sequences with daring shots from various angles and unusual camera movements. The director presents several dramatic scenes: clashes in the street, with charges by the police and the soldiers, deaths and injuries; brutal searches in this family’s apartment; violent confrontations between the married couple and the police; harrowing gatherings of parents with their fugitive children. He juxtaposes dialogues and monologues with performances of modern dance and relies on repetitions and reiterations, and he also provides a sophisticated mix of sounds, music and off-voices. Özcan Alper (1975), former assistant of Yesim Ustao÷lu and politically engaged with the left-wing and in defence of Kurdish artists, debuted with Sonbahar (Autumn) (2008), one of the best films of the last

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decade. It is an existential journey and an impossible love story that exemplifies the drama of a generation that is disillusioned by harsh social reality and by political defeat. The protagonist is the thirty-year-old Yusuf (Onur Saylak), sentenced in 1997 because of his militancy in the student movement and in a revolutionary left group. After 10 years in jail, disillusioned and frustrated, Yusuf is released from prison because he is victim of a serious respiratory disease. He returns to his native village in the eastern region of the country, in the hinterland of the Black Sea coast. His mother, now an old widow, greets him with affection. In this area the old men have remained, while the young people have left. Only one childhood friend remains: Mikail (Serkan Keskin). The protagonist looks for a refuge, but finds the beautiful mountain scenery oppressive. Thus he isolates himself, grieving for lost time: he is full of doubts. Alper presents

Figure 4.1: Sonbahar (Autumn) (2008), by Özcan Alper

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a series of rough images evocative of Yusuf’s past in prison, but also claustrophobic clips of archival visual materials relating to the ‘90s, and juxtaposes them with those of the protagonist’s wandering in the present time. One autumn day, while he is at the seaside, Yusuf meets Eka (Megi Kobaladze), a young Georgian prostitute who tries to get the money she needs to reunite with her child. Their worlds are different and the circumstances are perhaps inauspicious, but the result is a faint hope. They are two wounded souls seeking to overcome their fears and loneliness through love. This film depicts a compelling inner journey that indissolubly weaves together memories of an ineradicable past, a fleeting present and the lack of a credible future. It is a blend of images of death and fragments of daily existence, giving the sensation of a battle for life. The director handles time and space gently, providing a deliberately slow pace, with an abundant use of long shots. The result is an aesthetic that enhances both realistic aspects and metaphysical resonances. After Sonbahar (Autumn), Alper, along with Emre Akay and the debuting Zehra Derya Koç, Ülkü Oktay and Ahu Öztürk, made Kars öyküleri (Tales from Kars) (2010), a collective film consisting of five short films set in the Kars region in the northeast of Anatolia, on the border with Armenia, a rural area, rich in history and traditions. ‘Moto Guzzi,’ by Alper, takes place at the end of a very snowy winter and tells the delicate beginning of a love story between a little boy and girl who are classmates. ‘Ashes’, by Koç, describes the return home of a young woman who faces the painful and moving memories of her childhood. ‘Zilo’, by Oktay, describes the conflict between a little girl, who shows entrepreneurial spirit, and her parents. ‘Open Wound’, by Öztürk, is about the discovery of a family secret by a student who returned to his village for his grandmother’s funeral. ‘A Small Truth’, by Acay, presents a funny and absurd family story focused on a farmer nicknamed “the athlete.” In these stories we can recognize specific atmospheres, particular relationship problems, but with a universal value, and ambivalent contrasts with the past. The film offers a fresh and fascinating insight into life in the countryside made with different narrative and aesthetic solutions, balanced between realism and poetry. The second feature film by Alper, Gelezek uzun sürer (Future Lasts Forever) (2011), is an existential drama with a political background that takes place in Kurdistan. It is a road movie and a delicate love story set in a land subjected to a strict military control and marked by pain. Sumru (Gaye Gürsel) is a student in her twenties who is completing a master's degree in social anthropology at a University in Istanbul. To write her dissertation, she goes to Turkish Kurdistan’s chief town, Diyarbakir, with

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the aim of discovering the cultural roots of the Kurds. Being a professional ethnomusicologist, she carries out recordings of stories and poetic-musical elegies. Listening to the tales of several women who have lost their husbands or children, who were killed during clashes or raids by the Turkish army, she thinks back to her personal past. Sumru remembers her Kurdish boyfriend who separated from her three years before, returning to Hakkari, his hometown. Since then she no longer had any news of him. During her peregrinations she meets Ahmet (Durakan Ordu), a young man who sells homemade DVDs in the street and turns out to be an expert on popular music and a passionate cinéphile. The two become friends, Ahmet joins Sumru and mentors her. Together, they discover old videos which

Figure 4.2: Gelezek uzun sürer (Future Lasts Forever) (2011), by Özcan Alper

document the violent military operations of the ‘90s against Kurdish guerrillas and civilians. Sumru then asks him to help her find her missing boyfriend. So, they continue their journey to Hakkari. Gradually it appears that an affection is developing, but the woman, despite appearances, shows an inconsolable grief and is unable to reciprocate Ahmet’s sentiment. It is an intense and intimate film, which demonstrates a lively documentary approach and, at the same time, a clear partisan approach in relation to the Kurdish question, but without pedagogical meaning. A mature mise-enscène enhances the many facets of the story, avoiding in large part a

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prosaic tone. The shots of the streets and of the landscape are suggestive and complemented by an extremely rich sound design. Alper’s third feature film, Rüzgarin hatilaralari (Memories of the Wind) (2015) is a melancholic melodrama and a poetic meditation. It’s a gripping period portrait that explores the drastic personal consequences of political oppression. For left-wing dissidents in Turkey, the situation got increasingly desperate during the course of World War II. The right-wing Turkish government persecuted minorities and intellectuals. Aram (Onur Saylak), an Armenian writer, translator and painter, also works as a columnist for a Communist newspaper. In 1942 he has tohurriedly flee Istanbul, ending up in a small village on the Soviet-Georgian border by the Black Sea, where he is secretly given shelter in a remote log house on the hills. The host is Mikahil (Mustafa Ugurlu), an old farmer, surly and taciturn, married to the young Russian Meryem (Sofya Chandemirova), who moves around silently, minding the household. The relationship between the older man and the young woman is not completely clear but she seems to be more of an unwilling servant than a devoted wife. Aram is awaiting a possibility to escape to the Soviet Union to safety, but time is running out and opportunities to flee are scarce: the border is closed and heavily guarded. Furthermore some villagers are police’s informers. As tension and fear are increasing, Mikahil transfers his forbidden guest to a derelict shack in the woods, and Meryem provides food to him every day. Isolated in a magnificent mountain landscape and a primitive forest, Aram experiences being in hiding as an imprisonment, and his escape turns into a quest, in his memory, for traces of a lost time of childhood. In a series of carefully inserted flashbacks the audience see that his entire family was wiped out in 1915, during the Armenian genocide (an occurrence which has always been, and still is, denied by whatever Turkish regime is in power) and he alone, a youngster at the time, escaped by walking over an endless flat plain. Aram, prey to his own fearful hallucinations, keeps drawing, first in a notebook, and later on pieces of wood, black and grey charcoal images of a family that doesn’t exist anymore. He gradually develops a strong bond with Meryem, who in turn is imprisoned in her marriage. The bulk of the film takes place with very little dialogue and slow visual revelation of the gradual attraction between Meryem and Aram. For the two new lovers running away over the border looks like the only salvation. Alper offers an intense look at the persecution of minorities by the Turkish government in 1915 and during World War II. He attempts not to fully express Turkey’s historical responsibilities, but political references emerge nonetheless. Within the political and cultural atmosphere of the period, themes of love, time, exile, homeland, borders, freedom and

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Figure 4.3: Aúk ve devrim (Love and Revolution) (2011), by F. Serkan Acar

confrontation create an intriguing atmosphere, even though the narrative and mise-en-scène of the film include some conventional elements. F. Serkan Acar (1975), producer of the aforementioned Autumn, debuted with Aúk ve devrim (Love and Revolution) (2011), a youth melodrama that compares political ideology and feelings. Kemal (Gün Koper) is a shy university student in his twenties, coming from a rural region. In Istanbul, at the end of the 1980s, while attending university, he takes on a new political consciousness and becomes a member of a leftwing revolutionary political organization. He takes part in demonstrations and clashes in schools and in front of factories. Despite the harsh repression by the government, his commitment increases. Simultaneously, his attraction to Leyla (Deniz Denker), a resolute fellow student who is

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member of the same organization, grows. Then Abidin (Bedir Bedir), his closest friend, dies as a result of torture suffered during detention. Kemal accepts the order to live underground and to perform actions of armed terrorism against the police. Acar avoids a hyperbolic approach and opts for a quite effective intimate register, although showing some sketch-like shortcomings. His protagonist is not a leader, but a simple militant, an idealist who is capable of conviction and solidarity with his comrades, but also of judging them. Above all, he is conscious of the typical needs of his age and anxious to undertake new experiences. This film, with its welldeveloped screenplay, presents a remarkable study of its characters and offers a credible portrait of the political and cultural context of those years. Again, it clearly describes the protagonist’s strong need for belonging, his loss of innocence and the terms of a defeat, at a time when the cause of socialism had already lost its models. Ali Aydin (1981) made a significant debut film: Küf (Mold) (2012). It is a very bitter existential drama, a story of loneliness and suffering without hope that goes beyond an explicit underlying political condemnation. In fact, it refers to the terrible “normality” of the repressive lawlessness which characterized the strong authoritarian regime that was in force in Turkey in the ‘90s. At that time, many young students and workers, accused of subversive activity, were stopped and detained without trial, and subsequently disappeared. The story takes place in Belemedik, a small mountain village in Anatolia. The protagonist is Basri (Ercan Kesal), a fifty-year-old man who is alone due to multiple family losses. Basri is a railway worker in charge of the control of the tracks. Every day he walks many miles along the tracks and, at the same time, he broods over a fixed idea. Twenty years before, his son Seyfi went to study at the University in Istanbul. Then three years later, suddenly, Basri no longer had any news of him. He went to Istanbul and finally learnt from the police a dubious story. His son had become an anti-government militant, had been arrested and then vanished. This very distressing past is recreated with timely flashbacks. Since then, Basri tries to discover the truth about Seyfi’s disappearance. Every two weeks he sends a letter to the local police station with the same request, but he never gets a response. In this way Aydin depicts a long and obstinate struggle against a Kafkaesque power. This tragic torment is exemplified in the very long conversation – a single sequence shot with fixed camera lasting about 15 minutes – between Basri and the police inspector (Muhammet Uzuner). The latter would like to get Basri to stop forwarding the letters forever. The two, stubborn and determined, are sitting opposite each other, separated by a table, and are confronting each other, between fragments of tense

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conversation and silences. Basri is hardened and closed, weighed down by a secret. He is haunted by guilt because, being epileptic, he must hide his condition since, if it were made public, he would lose his job. This vulnerability leads him to commit an act that will fatally weaken his moral resolve towards power. Aydin rigorously creates a slow and iterative narrative rhythm. He tailors an exciting visual compactness through an abundant use of static shots and intense sequence shots. Moreover, he develops a perspective of quiet observation with the aim to bring out the hidden dynamics of power. The film is full of silences. What is unspoken concerns the personal tragedy of a “surviving” father, the discrimination, the prejudices, the concealed violence, and also the amnesia of the society. Onur Ünlü (1973), celebrated for describing with a surreal touch the existential, social and political contradictions, is an established author of thrillers and unpredictable comedies. He works between a reinterpretation of stereotypes and some creative aesthetic choices. He debuted with Polis (Police) (2006), a cynical thriller offering a portrait of a hard and old policeman, as determined in his work as he is problematic in his private life, a figure who recalls the anti-heroes of the films by Takeshi Kitano. Ünlü’s penultimate film, Sen aydinlatirsin geceyi (Thou Gild’st the Even) (2013), is an excellent tragicomedy, clever, abstruse and poetic, set in an imaginary small town in Anatolia, an odd place, seemingly peaceful and monotonous, where extraordinary events occur. The town is home to characters who possess paranormal powers, but who are victims of a kind of psychological helplessness and are thus, paradoxically, losers. Ünlü explores themes and behaviours that are typical of the province, complicating them with imaginative solutions. He presents an unconventional portrait that is, at times, surprising, tinged with caustic humour. This work orchestrates a minimalist plot of small episodes, preoccupations and mishaps of a very unique everyday life, reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin or Aki Kaurismäki and with references to the paintings of Chagall and the Surrealist artists. The latest film by Ünlü, Itirazim var (Let’s Sin) (2014), is a brilliant dark comedy with thriller elements, which contains explicit references to the hypocrisy and the lust for power that animate the actions of many powerful people and their associates in Turkey today. The protagonist is Selman Bulut (Serkan Keskin), an unusual Iman who runs a small mosque on limited means, in an old district of Istanbul. Selman is a fifty-year-old man, attached to his somewhat paradoxical small habits and playfully mocking, but he is honest and trusting his neighbour. One day, during morning prayer, a businessman, a regular at the temple, falls to the ground, murdered: a gunshot was heard, but no one saw the killer. Soon the Iman

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realizes that the policemen are incompetent or perhaps they are not interested in solving the case. He also finds himself implicated in the case, because the victim, before his death, deposited a huge amount of money into Selman Bulut’s bank account. Thus he decides to start his own personal investigation, using bizarre methods, to say the least. The result is a complicated swirl of events and plot twists, including comic scenes, pulp elements and hard-boiled detective homages. Long-held secrets will be revealed and both unexpected personal and sentimental relationships and a sequence of usurers and corruptions will come to light. It emerges that the Selman Bulut himself and the people around him, or dear to him, are all connected in some way to the murder. The screenplay written by Ünlü in collaboration with Sirri Süreyya Önder is perhaps too convoluted. However, it is very effective for a couple of reasons, firstly because it reveals the filmmaker’s fondness for a protagonist who embodies the tolerant soul of many people in Istanbul – the ones not appreciated by Prime Minister Erdo÷an– and because it represents an excellent close examination, in a heavily ironic way, of the mechanisms of political, economic and religious power. The narrative is fluid, despite some pacing problems, and the director recalls and subverts the well-known stereotypes and standards of the noir genre.

CHAPTER FIVE THE KURDISH ISSUE IN TURKISH CINEMA

In the last decade several directors of the last generation, both Kurdish and Turkish, have made films about the “Kurdish question.” As is known, around 18 million Kurds live in Turkey. They are concentrated mainly in the south eastern provinces of Anatolia where they are often the majority ethnic group. It is a community with its own language, adherent to the Muslim religion, with Sunni or Alevi orientation, and it is also present, in different minority percentages, in Syria, Iraq and Iran. This is an ethnic group that, after their request for independence was rejected in the 1920s, has suffered decades of discrimination and repression by the Turkish nationalists. In particular, since 1984, a Kurdish nationalist faction, the Marxist-inspired PKK, has fought a tenacious guerrilla war and made terrorist attacks against the Turkish state. At the same time, in the last 30 years, and especially in the 1990s, the Turkish army and intelligence service were responsible for a war that has heavily affected the Kurdish people, who mostly had nothing to do with the guerrilla movement. It is a controversial matter with a continuous curfew in the territory, mass arrests, killings of opponents and the repression of language and arts. Now, almost a decade has passed since the PKK was defeated and decimated in its ranks; however, the situation in Turkish Kurdistan remains complex and unresolved. Kurdish Kazim Öz (1973), former assistant to Yeúim Ustao÷lu and engaged with Özcan Alper in the defence of the Kurdish artists, has made films and documentaries that focus clearly on the ethnic and cultural identity of his people. He debuted with Foto÷raf (The Photograph) (2001), a tragic drama that tells the story of a friendship between two young men, one Turkish and the other Kurdish. The two meet during a bus trip. While one is on his way to the barracks where he will begin his military service, the other aims to join the Kurdish separatist guerrilla groups. The director shows sensitivity in dealing with a controversial subject and a good ability to manage a cast of non-professional actors.

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Figure 5.1:Bahoz / Firtina (The Storm) (2008), by Kazim Öz

However, Öz’s second feature film, Bahoz / Firtina (The Storm) (2008), is a small masterpiece. This is an impressive portrait of the politicization process of a group of students, mostly Kurds, at the University of Istanbul, in the early 1990s, a time when the student movement reached its maximum recruitment and power. In particular, he tells the story of three university students, Cemal (Cahit Gök), Rojda (Havin Funda Saç) and Orhan (Selim Akgül), who come from distant provinces and discover the metropolis. The real protagonist is Cemal, who comes from Dersim and, despite being Kurdish, is keen to mark his Alevi religious identity. He will be the first to join an anti-system leftist revolutionary organization. The film, in spite of its considerable duration, is well written and features witty and sharp dialogue. Moreover, it alternates traditional aesthetics and more experimental visual techniques. The director portrays in detail the daily dynamics of student life and deepens the presentation of the characters and their relationships, depicting them with a mixture of empathy and irony. He offers a clear and realistic insight into the mechanisms of political action in those years: the meetings, the leafleting, the preparation of Molotov cocktails, the demonstrations and the clashes with the police. Öz describes the strong idealism of these 17 and 18 year olds, but he does not hide the differences

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between them and the contradictions that are present in the protest groups. Accordingly the ending is left to the viewer’s interpretation. Öz’s latest film, Bir varmiú, bir yokmuú / He bû tune bû (Once Upon a Time) (2014), is a fresh and unusual docudrama. It tells the hard experience of a group of Kurdish seasonal agricultural workers, uncovering the exploitation that underpins the production of salad vegetables that Turks widely consume. And, at the same time, it narrates, with wit, an incredible teenage love story. At the centre of the plot there is a poor and large Kurdish family. Every year in springtime, men, women and children, led by the elderly householder, make a long and arduous journey by train from their home, located in the countryside near Batman, up to an area of large crops of lettuce in the region of Ankara. Some “recruiters” hired them for a few weeks. Along with other families of labourers, children and adults work at piece rates for the harvesting of the lettuce, with gruelling shifts and without protection. It is a very tiring activity that requires speed and accuracy, to be done always bent over, under the control of the older workers and supervisors. The workers have pitched their tents in the fields and live camped precariously. In these difficult conditions, a clandestine love affair blooms between a young man and a girl from two families who know each other. When, one day, the two run away, leaving the respective clans in distress, Öz describes the shame, the mutual accusations and a lively confrontation of positions through interviews and testimonies of the protagonists, the parents and their children. There is also an amusing interview with the owner of the fields, an entrepreneur who claims to be 44 years old and to be uninterested in love affairs. In the end, the most serious problem becomes that of the dowry to be given to the family of the future bride. This film represents an undeniable act of documentation and denunciation of a phenomenon that in Turkey concerns about one million underpaid labourers, mostly Kurdish and with a high percentage of minors. But Öz also manages to build a broader perspective, documenting the culture, customs and feelings of his people, despite some strained and artificial elements. Kurdish Miraz Bezar (1971), who has lived in Germany since childhood and who was Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu’s former assistant, has made Ben Gördüm / Min Dît (The Children of Diyarbakir) (2009). This first feature exemplifies the tragic political and social reality that was determined in the main city of Turkish Kurdistan. The story, set in the 1990s, opens with an impressive scene. One night, while driving on the road that connects Batman with Diyarbakir, a car is stopped by a patrol of armed men, according to a ritual that seems to be a routine police check. Suddenly these men shoot in cold blood, killing the husband and wife in

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the car, but sparing the three children who are with them: Gülistan, a tenyear-old girl, Firat, her younger brother, and Dilovan, who is only a few months old. The murdered man was a journalist on the staff of a newspaper in Kurdish language in Diyarbakir. Initially the surviving children find refuge in the house of Yekbun, their aunt. However, shortly after, she also disappears. Gülistan and Firat are forced to wander the streets of the city living by their wits. They meet other teenagers who commit petty thefts, sell or take drugs, and young girls turned to prostitution, all exploited by unscrupulous characters with the promise of helping them reach Germany. One day, by chance, Firat recognises the murderer of his parents, a soldier who has joined a clandestine death squad. Brother and sister will conceive a plan to get revenge. The director declared that he went to Diyarbakir in 2005 to make a painstaking investigation that lasted two years. He wrote the film’s screenplay after talking to several witnesses of similar events, merging elements from different stories. This film avoids piety and reveals a sharp documentary gaze, mindful of the examples of cinéma-vérité. Bezar’s style is simple and direct, makes effective use of hand-held camera, and draws fine performances from the cast of non-professional actors. Sedat Yilmaz (1972) debuted with Press (2010), a film inspired by the true story of the independent newspaper “Özgur Gündem.” This newspaper was published in the city of Diyarbakir, in Turkish Kurdistan, in the period from spring 1992 until 1994, when, after the declaration of the state of emergency in the region, the sale of its copies was prohibited. Later, its closure was imposed. During this period, almost all its editions were subject to changes, the editorial office was often subjected to brutal searches and violent intimidating raids, and death squads murdered many of its journalists and employees, with the complicity of the Turkish police and army. At the centre of the story is Firat (Aram Dildar), a determined and enthusiastic young man, hired as a handyman. First he becomes the guardian of the newspaper’s small headquarters, the witness and the protagonist of all the events. Then, gradually, he wins the trust of the small handful of journalists of the editorial office and then, after arrests and assassinations, he becomes one of those courageous reporters. The narrative – based on the memories of Bayram Balci, one of the newspaper’s reporters – is persistent, but without preaching or moralising. It must also be taken into account that the film is set in a territory in which the Turkish law enforcement agencies have not only fought the PKK terrorists, but were also responsible for serious illegal acts against the Kurdish people. Press is characterized by a classical linear structure and recalls several dramatic episodes of violence against the journalists and the

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Figure 5.2: Press (2010), by Sedat Yilmaz

violation of their civil rights, and of those who supported them. It is also emotionally engaging, especially because it shows the human relationships inside the small newspaper office that survives despite ferocious repression. It suggests that it is not a question of heroes, but rather of capable men and women who are passionate about their work and devoted to the search for the truth and the facts. This, as shown in the film, was real journalism, free and secular, attentive to social problems and not only devoted to the militant political condemnation. In fact, it also provides dangerous inquiries aimed at unmasking the tribal trafficking illegal activities and smuggling within the same Kurdish community. Yilmaz also communicates a genuine emotion, showing the unbearable psychological pressure imposed on the protagonists. They cleverly manage, sometimes with humour, to make up for all the restrictions and shortages they suffered. The cast is well chosen and the direction of the actors is impressive. Moreover, the old-style photography and the choice of a few amateur images help to make the early ’90s setting perfectly credible, as do the stimulating documentary cues shot in the streets of Diyarbakir.

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Figure 5.3:Iki dil bir bavul (On the Way to School) (2008) by Orhan Eskiköy and Zeynel Do÷an

Orhan Eskiköy (1980) and Kurdish Zeynel Do÷an (1979) made a first feature film, Iki dil bir bavul (On the Way to School) (2008), which combines fiction and documentary. It is an important work that focuses on a crucial problem, which was never addressed before in cinema: the plight of Kurdish children who, having no previous knowledge of Turkish language, enter the Turkish traditional education system. At the centre of the story is a newly appointed teacher, from the western part of the country, who begins teaching at the school of a faraway village in the southeast. This film presents, with remarkable lucidity, a year of this mutual learning experience, between September 2007 and June 2008, to establish a verbal communication. Thus it has contributed, in a nonsensational but effective way, to the crucial debate on the formalization and legalization of Kurdish language in Turkey. Eskiköy and Do÷an also directed Babamin sesi (Voice of My Father) (2012), a bare and understated existential drama with sparse dialogue, all played on gestures and looks. Mehmet (Do÷an himself) is a man in his thirties who lives with his young pregnant wife in Diyarbakir. Concerned about the condition of his elderly mother Basé (Asiye Do÷an, Zeynel’s mother herself), who lives alone in the small village of Elbistan, he goes to

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Figure 5.4: Babamin sesi (Voice of My Father) (2012), by Orhan Eskiköy and Zeynel Do÷an

visit her. In his old family home, Mehmet engages in a long discussion with his mother which reconstructs the identity and the secrets of Mustafa, his father, who died many years before. Long before, Mustafa had gone to Saudi Arabia to perform a well-paid job and, for years, he had been communicating with his family by sending long messages recorded on audiotapes. Then he suffered a fatal accident at work and died. Basé is reticent about her husband and refuses the offer of moving to Mehmet’s house. She shows interest only for the fate of Hasan, her eldest son who is far away. He has not been in touch with her for months because he is fighting with Kurdish guerrillas in unknown places. Perhaps the silent phone calls, which she regularly receives, come from him. From a simple daily life, the film develops an exciting minimalist poetic meditation on a painful family history and on a tormented land. It reconstructs the autobiographical story of Do÷an himself and of his scattered family, with a mise-en-scène that shows an effective balance between fiction and documentary. Kurdish Ferit Karahan, former assistant director of Sedat Yilmaz in Press, debuted with Cennetten kovulmak / Derbuyinaji bihuúte (The Fall from Heaven) (2013). This is a work rich in ambience and character aspects, which compares two corresponding female portraits connected by

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tragic circumstances. The story is set in 2001, at a time when the tension and the armed confrontation between Turks and Kurds were very intense. The protagonists are a woman in her twenties from Istanbul, graduate and professionally engaged, and a Kurdish teenager, naive and full of hopes, who lives in a rural village in eastern Anatolia. The pair are unacquainted and never meet each other, but they are linked by the presence / absence of a third person. Emine (Ezgi Asaro÷lu) is an electrical engineer and belongs to a middle-class traditional family. She is in her first work experience in a construction site and knows how to assert herself. Many young Kurdish workers, who are not registered, are involved in the construction of the apartment block. Emine watches them with a mixture of interest and distrust. News is received that her brother, who performed his military service in Turkish Kurdistan, was killed during a clash. Her parents are crushed by grief and Emine starts treating the Kurdish workers rudely and reproachfully. Among them is Kursad, a young guy who is fascinated by her. Still, shortly after, he dies tragically while working, due to an accidental cranial trauma. The staff of the construction site is panicstricken, the master builder is dismissed and no one claims the dead body. However, after a tormented self-examination, Emine obtains the address of the dead worker’s family and goes to Kurdistan with the coffin to return it to Kursad’s relatives. Meanwhile, Ayúe (Rojin Tekin) lives in a country house in a village named Mus with her large family. She is a thirteen-yearold girl who dreams of visiting Istanbul, the metropolis which is glorified on television and at school. One of her brothers, tired of the harassment by the Turkish military, joins the guerrillas, but a squad of Turkish paramilitaries kills him in an ambush. Then Ayúe and the others are forced to sell their land and to leave. But the viewer knows that Kursad is an acquaintance of Ayúe’s family. In the end the two different buses, carrying Emine and Ayúe respectively, will cross on the road. The political strength of the film is undeniable, but there are some narrative irregularities. Atilla Cengiz (1975) directed O÷ul (The Son) (2010), his debut film. This is a tragic drama in which the paths of two characters, who would have had no reason to meet, are fatally interwoven. The protagonist of the first story is Soner (Enes Atú), an eighteen-year-old boy, trustworthy but naive, from a middle-class family with no political interests. He lives in Giresun, a town in eastern Anatolia on the Black Sea coast. One day, driven by the passion for his girlfriend who works temporarily in the harvesting of hazelnuts, he decides to join her in Tunceli, a small town which is the capital of the mountainous province of the same name that counts a majority of Kurdish and Alevis. In fact, it is the first time that he has travelled eastward and he doesn’t know that in that area there are the

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Kurdish guerrillas. His family disapproves of the relationship with the girl and is unaware of his departure. The bus on which he is travelling is stopped at a checkpoint and a soldier of the Special Forces questions him aggressively. Though told to back out of his proposal, the young man does not give up and gets a ride from a truck driver carrying a group of workers. Then, a serious accident occurs. Soren’s fate intersects with that of Musa (Rza Akn), a middle-aged Kurdish highlander, desperate over the fate of his son, who joined a formation of PKK guerrillas. The soldiers are monitoring the situation. They have warned him that he will be held responsible if his son, who has let his father believe that he had moved away for work, does not return in a short time and does not report to the Turkish authorities. Cengiz opts for a humanistic approach, emphasizing how major political issues can shatter people’s lives, a sad prospect that particularly concerns the younger generation, those who have not yet had the opportunity to make experiences or take positions. This film has some writing shortcomings and some conventional dramatic effects, but, overall, it proves to be incisive. The real weakness is the invasive and overly insistent soundtrack, with some rhetorical musical passages that stifle its narrative potential. Kurdish Ahu Öztürk (1976) debuted with Toz Bezi (Dust Cloth) (2015) which is both a portrait of a friendship between two women and a social and ethnic drama about the difficulty of surviving as a member of the Kurdish working-class in Istanbul. Nesrin (Asiye Dinçsoy), shy and vulnerable, and Hatun (Nazan Kesal), tougher and smarter, are both cleaning women in elegant flats. Their existence is an endless round of shuttling between their shantytown homes and the classy neighbourhoods of their employers. They have to deal with difficult, privileged middleclass women, such as the ruthless and petty Ayten (Serra Yilmaz), before whom they assume a pose of submissiveness and who treats them with superiority. They live in the same apartment building and are close friends. Hatun is married to the lazy ùero (Mehmet Özgür) and has a troubled teen son Oktay (Yusuf Ancu). Nesrin, meanwhile, has kicked her husband out. This gesture was only intended as a warning to find a job, but now he hasn’t returned, and Nesrin and her 5-year-old daughter Asmin (Didem Inselel) find themselves in increasingly difficult circumstances. To enjoy proper social benefits, Nesrin would need to find a proper full-time job. Hatun, on the other hand, dreams of moving up in the world and of a life in the fashionable district of Moda, where she cleans the apartments of her wealthy clients. Her desire is so strong that she, a Muslim, even prays for it in a Christian church. Öztürk develops the narrative through a slowmoving, subtle and emotionally wrenching indictment of life’s trials as

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experienced by two women in Istanbul. But, despite an interesting social portrait and a genuine representation of the position of Kurdish people, the film is quite unconvincing in terms of substance and aesthetics. Its pacing is slow, but not always steady, while the ellipses in the storytelling sometimes look like scripting errors and produce cryptic results. In addition, the symbolism is often unnecessarily obvious or too explicit and, more importantly, it lacks a real sense of drama and proposes some unbelievable circumstances. It is possibly earnestness of purpose – namely, the strong desire to truthfully record the Kurdish experience of being marginalized in the middle of a merciless city – that leads Öztürk to an ineffective complexity. Dust Cloth is well-observed, but the protagonists are undeveloped, especially Nisrin, who is presented as a dubious mix of anxiety, desperation and, finally, utter hopelessness. The extensive use of the mobile handheld camera is irritating, and some shots are over-extended in the name of faithful naturalism which, nonetheless, does not enhance intensity. Finally, there are some directors who have made films about Kurdish people with a more sentimental and ethological approach and referring also to other ethnic and religious minorities. Hüseyin Karabey (1970), with a background as a documentary filmmaker and a commitment to human rights, debuted with Gitmek (My Marlon and Brando) (2008), which is both a sentimental melodrama with fable tones and a realistic road movie with strong documentary elements. Ayça (Ayça Damgaci) is a twenty-year-old girl, plump and determined. She lives in Istanbul and works in a small independent theatre as an actress and all-round collaborator. During the shooting of a film she falls in love with Hama Ali (Hama Ali Kahn), a Kurdish actor, who reciprocates her feelings. After work on the film is complete, the young man goes back to Süleymaniye, the city where he lives in Iraq. Soon after, the Allied troops, under the command of the U.S.A., invade the country and put an end to Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. The two lovers remain in telephone contact and he sends her periodic video messages. But the woman is consumed and thus she embarks on a dangerous and endless journey through Turkey to Iraqi Kurdistan, to reunite with Hama Ali. The film is predictable but pleasant, and the two protagonists are non-actors who play themselves with a nice lightness and humour. Karabey’s new film, Sesime gel (Come to My Voice) (2014), is a rural drama with a poetic tone. It is set in a small village in the mountains of Kurdistan where ancient community traditions remain alive, such as that in which all the people gather to listen to wandering storytellers. The film opens with a violent raid by the Turkish army in search of weapons and

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sympathizers of the separatist guerrilla movement. Some men, including Temo (Tuncay Akdemir), are arrested. His mother, Berfé (Feride Gezerg), and his daughter, Jiyan (Melek Ulger), are deeply concerned. The Turkish commanding officer declares that Temo will only be released if the Army receives the hidden weapons. The desperate Berfé gets in touch with some smugglers, who go back and forth to Iraq, to buy a gun, using the savings that would be necessary for her funeral. Afterwards, with her granddaughter she begins a long journey on foot through valleys and

Figure 5.5: Sesime gel (Come to My Voice) (2014), by Hüseyin Karabey

passes to retrieve the weapon. It is a journey in which the two women have to show courage and tenacity and in which they face dangers, but also the unexpected solidarity of three dengbejs, the blind storytellers. As such, the film becomes a small odyssey that mixes elements of fairytale, humour and magic. Karabey’s depiction of humiliating living conditions, avoiding dramatic rhetoric and focusing on the humanity of his characters and their attachment to traditional customs, proves to be effective. Kurdish Erol Mintaú (1983) directed his first feature film Annemin úarkisi (Song of My Mother) (2014), a highly appealing comedy-drama set in Istanbul. It portrays, with very clever humour and sensibility, the unenchanted world of a particular community in the metropolis, a “little Kurdistan,” featuring a multifaceted ensemble of memories, feelings and

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expectations. Ali (Feyyaz Duman), in his thirties, and his aging mother Nigar (Zübeyde Ronahi) are Kurds who live in the old multiethnic proletarian Tarlabaúi district, in the city centre. The neighbourhood has become a home to many Kurdish immigrants since the 1990s. The old woman retains her traditional habits. She is not accustomed to living in such a big city and longs to return to her village in south eastern Turkey which she was supposedly forced to leave after the incidents of ethnic clashes in the 1990s. Her son Ali, on the other hand, has pretty much settled in the town and works, ironically enough, as a schoolteacher of the Turkish language. When an urban regeneration project uproots them from their home, forcing them to settle far away in the Istanbul suburbs, the two protagonists must move to a remote new area of concrete blocks and tall buildings. Convinced that her old neighbours have all returned to their villages in Turkish Kurdistan, Nigar packs up her belongings every morning, ready to move back too. Ali tries different ways to keep her company: he frequently takes her out on his motorbike, buys her little chicks to look after, and tries to hunt down a cassette featuring a recording of the song she has been dreaming about, performed by one particular dengbej, that will transport her back to her youth. While Nigar tries to convince her son to take her back to a place that possibly no longer exists, Ali finds out that his girlfriend Zeynep (Nesrin Cavadzade) is pregnant. But he does not feel ready to become a father and is also not strong enough to plan a future with his beloved. The film operates within the poetic framework of a kind of unusual fairy tale, beginning in 1992 before fast-forwarding 20 years to the present-day. Mintaú explores with considerable subtlety the themes of urban gentrification and the Kurdish identity issue through an intimate mother and son relationship, one that also reflects wider relationship between the older and younger generations of Kurds, at its core. The film’s pacing and its aesthetic possess a quiet authority, and the director draws effective and sometimes touching performances from his cast. M. Tayfur Aydin (1981) debuted with Iz-Rêç (The Trace) (2011), a family drama with a political background that takes the form of a road movie. The eighty-year-old ùêristan (Melahat Bayram) lives in a workingclass district of Istanbul. Feeling that her last day is approaching, she asks her son Mîrza (Necmettin Çobano÷lu) to be buried in her native village, in Batman, Kurdistan, the place which the family had emigrated from some twenty years earlier. During the long journey by train, accompanied by her son and grandson, the old woman dies. Mîrza and Hêvî (Bilal Bulut) strenuously drag her coffin through the snow. Finally Mîrza reveals his mother’s secret: she was Armenian, but she had to conceal her ethnic

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origin and disown her first husband because of the fear of being killed by the Turks. Now she can rest next to her husband in the old Armenian cemetery in the abandoned village. The narrative is quite traditional, but the sense of a terrible, existential tragedy emerges with authenticity. Deniz Çinar (1979) made Içimdeki Çember (The Circle Within) (2013), his engaging second film, which tells the story of an obsession. But, above all, it reveals the cosmogony and the morals of an ancient ethno-religious minority: the Yazidis or Yezidis. This is a community that professes a mysterious monotheistic esoteric religion, which is not Islamic and is connected to Zoroastrianism. The participants worship the sun and believe in reincarnation and metempsychosis. In Turkey, they are present in Kurdistan and now reduced to about 500 individuals. However, they are far more numerous in northern Iraq and in Syria (tens of thousands) and also have a presence in Armenia and Georgia. Cinar’s film takes place in a valley among the mountains in the East part of the country, at an unspecified time. Halil (Coúkun Çetinalp) is an elderly street seller who belongs to the Yazidis. He is a humble man who moves from village to village on a horse, selling small items such as scissors, mirrors, toys, scarves and other odds and ends. One day, being very tired, he falls asleep in a small clearing, isolated in an upland area. When he wakes up, he realizes that he has been robbed: his money, the gun, the goods and his horse have all disappeared. He finds himself trapped in an invisible circle. However, despite the many efforts he makes, he is not able to extricate himself. Barring his way is Hasan (Firat Çinar), an evil man who dominates him psychologically, continually blaming and tormenting him. Their conversation merges with the fantastic representation of frightening visions that gradually destroy the spirit of this old man. Çinar’s film develops an atmosphere of considerable tension, combining suggestions and psychic traumas, moral and religious dilemmas, and references to the sense of belonging. This film is compelling, surprising and very intriguing because of its excellent dramatic structure. It succeeds as a real ethnic and para-psychological thriller.

CONCLUSION

As the previous chapters have demonstrated, the cinema in Turkey, from the mid-1990s, is showing the emergence and the consolidation of a strong and original authorship, which is accompanied by a growing recognition at the international level. A couple of new generations of independent filmmakers, who share a cinematographic ethos – despite the absence of common programmatic or aesthetic manifestos – have emerged. This is a personal cinema, which, with a wide variety of styles and approaches to storytelling, addresses the issues of identity in a country that is in a crucial phase of its history, both in social and political terms. It reckons with the problematic political and social context in contemporary Turkey, while also expanding and subverting the experience and expectations of the viewer in terms of space, time, agency, context and knowledge. It is possible to resume the fundamental issues presented in the book. The cinematographic and poetic language of the most prominent directors of the so-called third generation of Turkish cinema - namely those born in the early 1960s, who debuted in the mid-1990s and individually can boast an impressive filmography (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Yeúim Ustao÷lu, Zeki Demirkubuz, Derviú Zaim, Semih Kaplano÷lu, Reha Erdem, Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu and others) - marked the beginning of a new tendency. These filmmakers often express themselves through the choice of a specific path, the trilogy of films, although revealing different purposes in the filmmaking context. Their films explore unexpressed feelings, problems of belonging, and the resistance to the identification with predetermined social codes. Many of the characters presented conceive their own existence in a transitional space. The dilemmas they face lead them to a condition of itinerant wandering, although often they deliberately choose this status to break free from the conventions of their previous existence. As such, their identity is always placed in a liminal space, a sort of limbo: between the city and the province, between ethnic and political affiliation, or even between rationality and madness. The characters, in one way or another, frequently reflect the contradictions of the directors’ own search for truth and identity. Indeed, the films often explore issues related to the autobiographical experiences of the filmmakers: the rural or provincial setting, the contradictions of urban life, the family, parent-child relationships, the conflicts in marital or couple relationships, the

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commitment to the student movement. In addition, many works made in the last two decades explore the link between personal and political matters. The characters’ positioning not only represents the ideological affiliation of the directors, but also reveals the growing courage of many Turkish artists and intellectuals who are willing to deal more openly with urgent issues and sensitive topics. The films of the most recent generation of filmmakers, born in the 1970s and 1980s, who, in the great majority, made their debut in the last decade (Seyfi Teoman, Pelin Esmer, Emin Alper, Seren Yüce, Ali Aydin, Mahmut Fazil Coúkun, and others), are showing a fierce independence. However, they are often supported by local and international Institutes and Film Funds. These directors are living in a time that offers more opportunities to explore different themes. The economical deregulation, the loss of importance of the role of the Army in the political scene, the government’s project of “stabilization” of the conflict in Turkish Kurdistan allow the directors to deal openly and critically with delicate social and political matters. At the same time political tensions, scandals, judicial inquiries and criminal trials for corruption increase the public interest in issues such as law, public morals, social order, the equilibrium between tradition and modernization, and the role of the Islamic religion. All these factors stimulate the creativity of the filmmakers. They conceive new relations between their personal experiences of life and the social conscience and depict existential contradictions into the families and among young people, portraits of women, religious themes and moral dilemmas. There is also a strong trend, among some filmmakers of the last generation (Özcan Alper, Ali Aydin, Onur Ünlü, and others), to directly confront political themes related to dramatic times and crucial events in the last 50 years of Turkey’s history. Their films tell stories of brutal violence and repression by the state forces and institutions, such as the police, the judiciary and the detention system, against democratic activists and left-wing militants. However, these films are not mere propaganda; rather, they are compelling existential dramas. Finally, the increase in visibility of films made by directors belonging to the minorities present in Turkey, and reflecting their specific issues through their own voices and perspectives, is also considerable. Especially noteworthy in this context is the emergence of Kurdish directors including Kazim Öz, Miraz Bezar, Zeynel Do÷an and Erol Mintaú who gained the relative freedom to shoot in their own language and are able to tell original stories about their culture and the tragic situation of the people in Turkish Kurdistan through a political and social point of view. However, it should

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also be noted that some Turkish directors (Sedat Yilmaz, Orhan Eskiköy, Atilla Cengiz, Hüseyin Karabey, and others) also made films about the “Kurdish question,” showing a truthful empathy with the people, but avoiding dramatic rhetoric and opting for a humanist approach.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dorsay, Atilla (2004) Years of Collapse and Renaissance of Our Cinema: Turkish Cinema 1990 - 2004, Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi. —. (2010) Our Cinema Change Winds: Turkish Cinema 2005 –2010, Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi. Dönmez-Colin, Gönül (2006) Women, Islam and Cinema, London: Reaktion Books. —. (2008) Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging, London: Reaktion Books. Ellinger, Ekkehard and Kayi, Kerem (2008) Turkish Cinema, 1970 - 2007: a Bibliography and Analysis, Frankfurt um Main: Peter Lang. Onaram, Gözde and Yücel, Firat (2011) Cinema Turkey: New Times, New Tendencies, Istanbul: Altyazi Project Office Suner, Asuman (2010) New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory, London: I.B. Tauris. Teksoy, Rekin (2008) Turkish Cinema, Istanbul: O÷lak Yaynclk. Yücel, Müslüm (2008) Kurdish in Turkish Cinema, østanbul: Agora kitapl÷. Istanbul Film Festival’s Catalogues, 2007 – 2014. Festival on Wheels’s Catalogues, 2004 – 2014. Festival International du Film d’Amiens (2009) Yesilçam: L’age d’or du cinéma turc.

INDEX

2 Girls, 45-46 9, 48-49 10 to 11, 59 Acar, Serkan F., 82-83 Love and Revolution, 82-83 Akar, Serdar, 48 In the Bar, 48 On Board, 48 Alper, Emin, 2, 11, 53-54, 102 Beyond the Hill, 53-54 Frenzy, 54-55 Alper, Özcan, 3, 11, 51, 77-82, 89, 102 Autumn, 77-79, 85 Future Lasts Forever, 79-81 Memories of the Wind, 81-82 Tales from Kars, 79 A Man’s Fear of God, 47 Angel’s Fall, 25-26 Apprentice, The, 71-72 A Run For Money, 33 Ataman, Kutlu÷, 45-46 2 Girls, 45-46 Journey to the Moon, 46 Lola + Bilidikid, 45 The Lamb, 46 The Serpent’s Tale, 45 Atay, Ömür, 49 Autumn, 77-79, 85 Away From Home, 24-25 Ayan Hanim, 77 Aydin, Ali, 2, 3, 11, 83-84, 102 Mold, 83-84 Aydin, M. Tayfur, 98 The Trace, 98  Bahadir Er, Mehmet, 51 Balci, Ermine, Emil, 68, 70-71

Until I Lose My Breath, 68 Baú, Belma, 11, 52-53 Zephir, 52-53 Baúarir, lksen, 65-66 Love in Another Language, 6566 Merry-go-round, 66 Beyond the Hill, 53-54 Bezar, Miraz, 92, 102 The Children of Diyarbakir, 92 Blue Bicycle, 73-74 Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds, 4445 Bulut, Aydin, 49 Children of the Otherside, 49-50 C Block, 21 Çelik, Reis, 45 F Type Film, 45 Goodbye Tomorrow, 45 Refugee, 45 Night of Silence, 45 There Be Light, 45 Cengiz, Atilla, 94-95, 103 The Son, 94-95 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, 2, 3, 10, 11, 1321, 44, 51, 101 Climates, 16 Clouds of May, 14-15 Cocoon, 13-14 Distant, 15, 46 Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, 18-19 Small Town, 14 Three Monkeys, 16-17 Winter Sleep, 19-21 Children of Diyarbakir, The, 92 Children of the Otherside, 49-50 Çinar, Deniz, 98-99 The Circle Within, 98-99

108 Circle Within, The, 98-99 Climates, 16 Clouds of May, 14-15 Cocoon, 13-14 Cold of Kalandar, 69-70 Come to my Voice, 96-97 Confession, 22 Coskun, Mahmut Fazil, 3, 11, 5658, 102 Wrong Rosary, 56-57 Yozgat Blues, 58 Cosmos, 35 Cycle, The, 32 Da÷, Nisan, 72-73 Things I Cannot Tell, 72-73 Demirdelen, Selim, 49 Demirkubuz, Zeki, 3, 11, 21-24, 51, 101 C Block, 21 Confession, 22 Destiny, 22-23 Ember, 23-24 Envy, 23 Fate, 22 Innocence,21-22 Inside, 23 The Third Page, 22 The Waiting Room, 22 Destiny, 22-23 Distant, 15-16, 46 Do÷an, Zeynel, 92-93, 102 On the Way to School, 92 Voice of My Father, 92-93 Dot, 31 Dust Cloth, 98-99 Egg, 26 Elephants and Grass, 30-31 Ember, 23-24 Envy, 23 Erdem, Reha, 3, 10 29, 33-36, 101 A Run For Money, 33 Cosmos, 35 Jin, 35-36 Mommy, I’m Scared, 33

Index My Only Sunshine, 34-35 Oh Moon, 33 Singing Women, 36 Times and Winds, 33-34 Erdo÷an, Recep, Tayyip, 3-7, 52, 88 Eskiköy, Orhan, 94-96, 103 On the Way to School, 92 Voice of My Father, 92-93 Esmer, Pelin, 3, 59-60, 102 10 to 11, 59 Watchtower, 59-60 Evci, Selim, 51, 61-62 Two Lines, 61-62 Winds, 62 F Type Film, 45 Fall From Heaven, The, 93-94 Fate, 22 Fish, 32-33 Foto÷raf, 89-90 Frenzy, 54-55 Future Lasts Forever, 79-81 Goodbye Tomorrow, 45 Gülmez, Muharrem, 78 International, 78 Hacihafizo÷lu, Faruk, 76-77 Snow Pirates, 76-77 Hair, 42-43 Haze, 41-42 Home, 46-47 Homecoming, 76 Honey, 27-28

Impeccables, The, 69-70 I’m Not Him, 43-44 Inaç, Atil, 77 Zincirbozan, 77 Innocence, 21-22 In Nowhere Land, 40 Inside, 23 International, 78 In the Bar, 48 Irmak, Ça÷an, 11, 75

New Cinema in Turkey My Father and My Son, 75 Istanbul Tales, 49 Jin, 35-36 Journey to the Moon, 46 Journey to the Sun, 37 Kaplano÷lu, Semih, 2, 11, 24-29, 44, 70, 101 Away From Home, 24-25 Angel’s Fall, 25-26 Egg, 26 Honey, 27-28 Milk, 27 Kara, Mustafa, 69-70 Cold of Kalandar, 69-70 Karabey, Hüseyin, 3, 96-97, 103 Come to My Voice, 96-97 My Marlon and Brando, 96 Karahan, Ferit, 93-94 The Fall From Heaven, 93-94 Katiksiz, Deniz Akçay, 65 Nobody’s Home, 65 Kiziltan, Özer, 47 A Man’s Fear of God, 47 Koç, Zehra Derya. 79 Tales from Kars, 79 Konuk, Emre, 71-72 Apprentice, The, 71-72 Koreken, Ümit, 70-71 Blue Bicycle, 70-71

 Lamb, The, 46 Let’s Sin, 84-85 Lifelong, 61 Lola + Bilidikid, 45 Love and Revolution, 82-83 Love in Another Language, 65-66 Majority, 63-64 Matin, Ramin, 67 The Monster’s Dinner, 67 The Impeccables, 69-70 Memories of the Wind, 81-82 Men on the Bridge, 60-61

109

Merry-go-round, 66 Milk, 27 Mintaú, Erol, 97-98, 102 Song of My Mother, 97-98 Mold, 83-84 Mommy, I’m Scared, 33 Monster’s Dinner, The, 67 Motherland, 68-69 Mud, 31 My Father and My Son, 75 My Marlon and Brando, 96 My Only Sunshine, 34-35 Night of Silence, 45 Nobody’s Home, 65 Oh Moon, 33 Oktay, Ülkü, 79 Tales from Kars, 79 On Board, 48 Once Upon A Time, 91-92 Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, 1819 Önder, Sirri Süreyya, 78 International, 78 On the Way to School, 92 Our Grand Despair, 56 Overture, 66 Öz, Kazim, 3, 51, 89-92, 102 Once Upon A Time, 91-92 The Photograph, 89-90 The Storm, 90-91 Özdemir, Muzaffer, 15, 46 Home, 46-47 Özge, Asli, 3, 60-61 Men on the Bridge, 60-61 Lifelong, 61 Öztürk, Ahu, 79, 98-99 Tales from Kars, 79 Pandora’s Box, 38-39 Particle, The, 66-67 Photographer, The, 89-90 Pirselimo÷lu, Tayfun, 2, 11, 40-45, 101 Hair, 42-43

110 Haze, 41-42 I’m Not Him, 43-44 In Nowhere Land, 40 Riza, 41 Police, 84 Pomegranate, 49 Present Tense, 64 Press, 90-91 Refugee, 45 Riza, 41 Sabanc, Kudret, 49 Saydam, Esra, 72-73 Things I Cannot Tell, 72-73 Semerci, Levent, 77 Ayan Hanim, 77 Serpent’s Tale, The, 45 Shadowless, 49 Shadows and Faces, 31-32 Singing Women, 36 Small Town, 14 Snow Pirates, 76-77 Somersault in a Coffin, 29-30 Somewhere in Between, 39-40 Son, The, 94-95 Song of My Mother, 97-98 Söylemez, Belmin, 64 Present Tense, 64 Storm, The, 90-91 Summer Book, 55-56 Tales from Kars, 79 Teoman, Seyfi, 3, 11, 51, 55-56, 102 Summer Book, 56 Our Grand Despair, 56 Tepegöz, Erdem, 66-67 The Particle, 68-69 There Be Light, 45 Things I Cannot Tell, 72-73 The Third Page, 22 Thou Gild’st the Even, 84 Three Monkeys, 16-17 Times and Winds, 33-34 Trace, The (Ustao÷lu), 37 Trace, The (Aydin), 98

Index Tuzen, Senem, 68-69 Motherland, 687-69 Two Lines, 61-62 U÷ur, Ömer, 76 Homecoming, 76 U÷urlu, Alpgiray M., 66 Overture, 66 Uluçay, Ahmet, 11, 44-45 Boat Out of Watermelon Rinds, 44-45 Ünal, Ümit, 48-49 9, 48-49 Istanbul Tales, 49 Pomegranate, 49 Shadowless, 49 The Voice, 49 Ünlü, Onur, 84-85, 102 Let’s Sin, 84-85 Police, 84 Thou Gild’st the Even, 84 Until I Lose My Breath, 68 Ustao÷lu, Yeúim, 2,3, 11, 36-40, 51, 63, 77, 89, 101 Journey to the Sun, 37 Pandora’s Box, 38-39 Somewhere in Between, 39-40 The Trace, 37 Waiting for the Clouds, 37-38 Voice, The, 49 Voice of My Father, 92-93 Waiting for Heaven, 31 Waiting for the Clouds, 37-38 Waiting Room, The, 22 Watchtower, 59-60 Winds, 62 Winter Sleep, 19-21 Wrong Rosary, 56-57 Yilmaz, Sedat, 3, 90-91, 103 Press, 90-91 Yozgat Blues, 58 Yolcu, Yücel, 46 Yüce, Seren, 2-3, 63-64, 102

New Cinema in Turkey Majority, 63-64 Zaim, Derviú, 3, 10, 29-33, 51, 101 Dot, 31 Elephants and Grass, 30-31

Fish, 32-33 Waiting for Heaven, 31 Zephir, 52-53 Zincirbozan, 77

111