The other side of the Turkish film revolution

25 February 2009

BEIRUT: In the last decade or so, a handful of Turkish filmmakers have made that country's cinema among the most admired in the world - witness "Three Monkeys," which won Nuri Belge Ceylan the award for best director at Cannes last year. Commercial film distribution being what it is, though, the selection available to Beirut residents, for instance, is eclectic but limited.

Very rarely, the multiplexes will sample Turkey's popular cinema, as it did a few years ago with Serdar Akar and Mustafa Sevki Dogan's US-critical spy flick "Valley of the Wolves." The movies of German-Turkish prodigy Fatih Akin may be projected once or twice a year, thanks to the city's European Film Festival. Ceylan's recent work has seeped into Metropolis, the city's lone art house cinema.

The 50-year-old Ceylan and his contemporaries represent a first generation of Turkish independent film. Their work arose after the collapse of the country's popular film industry, Yesilcam (pronounced "Yeshilcham"), in the 1980s.

Yesilcam specialized in melodramas and comedies. "There was a star system, so certain actors and actresses played in lots of movies," says Istanbul-based critic Firat Yucel. "In the 1960s and 1970s it was very like Bollywood, with maybe 200 films shot per year. Some scriptwriters made 10 films a year and the movies were formulaic.

"Production values were very low, very kitsch and funny. Some copied Hollywood and French movies. Some would re-make a Bergman movie as a melodrama, something you can find in Bollywood as well. The state didn't support this cinema much but there was lots of censorship," Yucel adds.

Yucel was among the Turks attending the 2009 edition of the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, which set aside a special program dedicated to two generations of Turkish cinema. Many filmmakers accompanied their works to Rotterdam, as did several of Yucel's colleagues at Altyazi, Istanbul's monthly cinema magazine, who contributed a short essay collection to the program.

IFFR dedicates itself to new filmmakers so Ludmila Cvikova, who programs the festival's Signals section, said she decided to make six new films by younger artists the core of her Turkish program.

Mahmut Fazil Coskun's "Wrong Rosary," which walked away from IFFR with one the festival's three Tiger Awards, had its world premier in Rotterdam, as did Mehmet Bahadir Er and Maryna Gorbach's "Black Dogs Barking." The program was rounded out by Kazim z's "The Storm," zcan Alper's "Autumn," Seyfi Teoman's "Summer Book" and Selim Evci's "Two Lines" - all from 2008.

Giving some context to these films were some art film classics and new works by more established indie filmmakers. "Milk," the second installment in Semih Kaplanoglu's Yusuf Trilogy screened, as did "Pandora's Box," the latest film by Yesim Ustaoglu, which won the Golden Seashell at last year's San Sebastian Film Festival.

While Ceylan's films are known for their existential themes, Ustaoglu tends to be more engaged politically. Her 1999 premier "Journey to the Sun," which won a slew of awards, follows a small circle of Kurdish Turks, pinned between the Kurdish insurgency and the Turkish state's repression of Kurdish speakers.

"Pandora's Box" tells the story of the three mature children of the elderly but free-spirited Nusret, and their efforts to restrain her when it is discovered she has Alzheimer's Disease.

Ustaoglu was in Rotterdam to serve on IFFR's competition jury. When she began making movies, she recalls, "independent filmmakers had to do one of two things - either to be very, very minimal, as in my case, or to seek foreign co-producers. So I learned how make my films just like small filmmakers in underdeveloped countries all over the world."

The script for "Journey to the Sun" won a production grant at Montpellier, she said, and she found co-producers and foundations interested in such small projects, among them her present producer Beyrooz Hashemian, the Iranian-born founder of Silk Road Productions. "Beyrooz," she said, "taught me the creativity of raising money - how to finance though soft money the rather than spending money from you own pocket."

A not uncommon story among Arab filmmakers concerns some foreign co-producers being paternalistic about the content of the work. Ustaoglu says her foreign co-producers have never tried to pigeonhole her work.

"If the project is good, you find interest. It's not only political films they support. As with all struggling countries, we have many ideas. In places where people are comfortable ..." she gestures to the cinema-goers at Rotterdam's festival central "... I think it's too static."

"[The Europeans] are supportive, which is very good of course, but in a way it makes it less easy to work. You have come here to deal, to do post-production ... This increases the budget and makes the process take a very long time.

"But we have ideas. They need those ideas. Asia, Latin America, Central Asia, the Middle East, there are things to make films about because life isn't easy there."

In 2005, Turkish filmmakers' financial opportunities broadened when the Ministry of Culture's Commission for Supporting Cinema launched a fund providing development grants for young filmmakers and production loans. The commission will cover 30 percent of a film's budget, Ustaoglu says, so "you must have, or claim to have, the other finance in place."

The younger generation of Turkish filmmakers resist being lumped together as a "New Wave." "Altyazi" Critic Enis Kostepen has argued that no aesthetic or narrative tendencies link them.

What does unite them, Kostepen says, are matters of political economy: Their success in developing debut feature films not primarily geared toward the commercial market. Nearly all have used social networks to gather funds, crews and discounted equipment.

Yucel does discern thematic patterns in Turkey's independent cinema. The dialogue between auteur cinema and pop culture is a recurrent motif, but he doesn't necessarily believe it's a theme the filmmakers intend to take up.

The prototype for the artful treatment of Turkish melodrama in Zeki Demirkubuz's 1997 film "Innocence." Recounting an encounter between an ex-convict - imprisoned for shooting his sister and killing her lover - and a dysfunctional couple, nearly every interior scene includes a televised melodrama. It is also evident in Ceylan's work, most recently "Three Monkeys," and in that of some young filmmakers - like Evci's "Two Lines," which follows a young bourgeois Istanbul couple as they vacation during a rough patch in their relationship.

Another theme uniting the work of these independent filmmakers are matters of center and periphery.

"Most of the movies made in the provinces reflect a melancholy associated with being away from the center. We have a word for this in Turkish, tashra ("provincial"). The center is always Istanbul. It's so prevalent a theme that we talk about these movies being a sub-genre of Turkish cinema. Ceylan's "Small Town," and Semih Kaplanoglu's films fall into this tradition.

"The periphery is also connected to the political issue of Kurdish-Turkish identity. It's a problem we have to talk about because until recently Kurdish was banned from being spoken in film. Now we have people shooting films in Kurdish. Oz's 'The Storm' is a very important movie because it reflects the point of view of characters you may call 'terrorists' but you get to see them, identify with them or not, and their protests."

The other half of the filmmaking equation involves getting this work seen, an effort which raises issues of censorship as well as distribution.

"Censorship has changed a lot in the last decade," Ustaoglu says. "If films are controversial, they can have problems - like censorship from the society and media. I felt this with my own films, which were not really welcomed or ignored.

"Nowadays, there's no straight censorship. The state gives or withholds permission to shoot, of course, and you need Ministry of Culture permission to screen in the cinemas. There is not the same real control as before but ... when you apply to the Cinema Commission for production money with a very controversial subject, then you might have difficulties.

"With 'Journey to the Sun,' it was almost impossible to find a distributor. But the cinemas wanted the film, so we took our eight copies of the 35mm print and went from cinema to cinema. We premiered in [the largely Kurdish city of] Diyarbakir.

"Very soon it was distributed illegally on CD. Once in Istanbul a young boy on the street was trying to sell me the CD of my movie.

"Later, Turkish cinema started to develop in two ways. On one hand there is an amazing popular commercial cinema that makes very good box office returns, much better than American blockbusters. Hundred of copies of these big commercial films are distributed, and they sort of block the minds of people as well as the cinemas where we want to screen ourselves. Today we have a distributor but the distributor can't find open cinemas.

"Still, [zcan Alper's] 'Autumn' [which recounts a leftist militant's return to his Black Sea-coast village after he's released from high-security prison] had great box office success and it's still in the cinema.

"Now in Turkey we have around 1,400 cinemas, and maybe one or two art-house cinemas in Istanbul. We started 'Pandora's Box' in 13 cinemas in Istanbul. There was no cinema in Izmir. It was completely blocked with big Turkish commercial films.

"I don't want to complain. Turkish people are going to the cinema to see their own films. But we need more independent cinemas, supported by ... I shouldn't always say 'state supported,' but there must be some other system to support these kind of cinemas."

It's a refrain that reverberates, even in Beirut.

Copyright The Daily Star 2009.