Hülya Koçyigit

Follows the life of a Turkish woman living and working in Germany.

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Almanya Acı Vatan (Germany, Bitter Home) presents two emigrants trying to cope with their life in Germany: Mahmut, a man in his mid-thirties, and Güldane who accepts Mahmut’s offer to marry him in exchange for a large sum of money so that he is able to stay in Germany legally. They travel to Germany together, but Güldane leaves Mahmut on his own in the foreign country. As they are mutually dependent (Güldane needs protection when she finds herself harassed by a stalker while Mahmut needs his wife to prove that he is not an illegal worker) they decide not to end their marriage of convenience, but to actually create a pleasant life together.Read More »

A midwife is caught in a snowstorm on the way to Anatolia and forced to spend four months in an isolated village., where she’s soon tending sick children and delivering babies.Read More »

The Wedding, which is the second part of Akad’s trilogy, depicts the struggles of a migrant Anatolian family to adapt to and survive in the very different conditions of urban Istanbul, is one of the best presentations of internal migration in Turkish cinema. Akad uses the experiences of a provincial family as his medium for drawing attention to a period of disintegrating feudal relationships and burgeoning proletarianism. And this strikes the kind of political chord that is rarely encountered now in Turkish cinema; an approach that is borne out by the film’s ‘happy ending’. The Wedding is profoundly impressive as a film that explores and comments on the painful period of change sweeping Turkey at the time, but also for its standpoint, a combination of social realism and socialist reality.Read More »

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Lütfi Akad completes with Diyet (Blood Money) his trilogy based on internal migration. Diyet depicts the struggles of a migrant Anatolian family to adapt to and survive in the very different conditions of urban Istanbul. Akad uses the experiences of a provincial family as his medium for drawing attention to a period of disintegrating feudal relationships and burgeoning proletarianism. And this strikes the kind of political chord that is rarely encountered now in Turkish cinema.Read More »

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The Bride, which depicts the struggles of a migrant Anatolian family to adapt to and survive in the very different conditions of urban Istanbul, is one of the best presentations of internal migration in Turkish cinema. It is also the first, and most accomplished film in Ömer Lütfi Akad’s celebrated trilogy, which with The Wedding (Dügün, 1973) and Blood Money (Diyet) has earned a respected place in world cinema for its thematic unity. The Bride masterfully exposes the evolution of ‘little Anatolia’ in Istanbul, a phenomenon that would go on to acquire far larger dimensions.Read More »