Turkey

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In spite of the palpable ubiquity of misogyny across many diverse quarters of the Arabic world, filmic representation of the Middle Eastern female subaltern often feels reductive, and at its most egregious it can seem a subtle endorsement of the very behavior it ostensibly means to penetrate and vilify. Though not quite an unintentional apologia for sexism, the Turkish film Bliss is an illustration of how inadequate fiction can be at tackling the über-sober topic of sexual victimization. Mere hours before the movie’s first scene, young adult Meryem (Özgü Namal) is brutally violated and left for dead on a pastoral beach adjacent to her small village; despite the glaringly nonconsensual nature of the forced coupling she’s endured, her community ostracizes her as a strumpet per tradition and has her ushered out of town to be executed by Cemal (Murat Han), a male cousin returning from military service. In the first two acts Cemal wrestles with his own demons (mostly yawningly recondite combat flashbacks) as he struggles to maintain cultural dignity at the cost of committing what he clearly views to be senseless murder, and Meryem is a tangle of frayed nerves that we suspect obscure some painfully trite twists (we’re correct).Read More »

Why Can’t I Be Tarkovsky? (Neden Tarkovski Olamiyorum…) by Murat Düzgünoğlu (2014, 95 min.). Bahadır, an aspiring 35-year-old director, earns his living making cheap television films inspired by the stories behind Anatolian folk songs. His dream is to make films like his idol, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, though it seems that everything stands between him and his ambition.

This low-key, tragicomic story presents us with a glimpse of the life of Bahadir, director of TV movies, who dreams of making artistically ambitious films like those of his idol, Andrei Tarkovsky.Read More »

Structured around readings by renowned critic and essayist John Berger, TASKAFA (2013, 66 mins) offers a brilliantly incisive meditation on urban space and city life by investigating the complex history of Istanbul’s street dogs. Despite several major attempts by Istanbul’s rulers, politicians and planners over the last 400 years to erase them, the city’s street dogs have persisted thanks to an enduring alliance with civilian communities that recognize and defend their right to co-exist. Taskafa gathers the voices of diverse Istanbul residents, shopkeepers, and street based workers, all of whom display a striking commitment to the well-being and future of the city’s canine population.Read More »

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A sequel to Laleli’de Bir Azize, and with the collaboration of practically the same team, Gemide is the story of four sailors who sit around the ship and spend their time smoking pot. Their routine life turns upside down when one of them gets mugged and badly beaten.Read More »

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Motherland Hotel (Anayurt Oteli) is a 1986 Turkish film directed by Ömer Kavur. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Yusuf Atılgan.

Zebercet owns a hotel in a small provincial town. He manages to keep it up with the help of one maid, a little girl who lives with him. One evening, one of the clients leaves the hotel, promising to return in a week. Haunted by the memory of the beautiful unknown, it leaves little to be gained by a little melancholy. Overwhelmed by his impulses, he refuses to take any clients, and closes the hotel.Read More »

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Two Turkish women one oppressed by sexist traditions and one liberated by modern mores, have more in common than it would seem.Read More »

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Set along the Turkish-Syrian frontier, this terse, elemental tale of smugglers contending with a changing social landscape brought together two giants of Turkish cinema. Director Lütfi Ö. Akad had already made some of his country’s most notable films when he was approached by Yılmaz Güney—a rising action star who would become Turkey’s most important and controversial filmmaker—to collaborate on this neo-western about a quiet man who finds himself pitted against his fellow outlaws. Combining documentary authenticity with a tough, lean poetry, Law of the Border transformed the nation’s cinema forever—even though it was virtually impossible to see for many years.Read More »

Synopsis
“Clair Obscur” is the psychological dance of two women who are deprived of and distanced from their natural right to mature and discover themselves, to love and be loved, and to sustain a real relationship of their choosing. The social cost of these psychological wounds reverberates from micro to macro levels throughout society, rotting it from within.Read More »

When her husband Cemal is arrested in Romania, Emine is left alone with their child who needs immediate surgery. She takes a job as a needle worker at a garment workshop where she comes across Ziya, her husband’s former boss. He can’t stay indifferent when he learns what the woman he once fancied is going through. When Cemal returns months later, he finds Emine working at the garment workshop and their son healthy. A hospital bill he accidentally sees reveals that Ziya has paid for the surgery and Emine hid this fact. Will Cemal, who already blames Ziya for what he went through and is extremely jealous of Emine, be able to confront this situation or choose to ignore it?Read More »