The Turkish diaspora and Eskiya

A film festival, if it is to be successful, needs to reflect and cater to the diverse agendas of the local diaspora. Despite being relatively small, the Turkish diaspora in Australia is fragmented. It is comprised of unskilled factory workers who emigrated in the late 1960s and early 70s, educated skilled migrants in the 1980s, asylum seekers, second-generation Turks who may be more allied to Australia than the homeland and more recently students. The different political allegiances (the socialists, the nationalists, Islamists and the Ataturk secularists) are amplified in the diasporic setting and also through Australia’s ‘tyranny of distance’.(6)The challenge of the film festival was to bring all these people together and this was achieved through the film Eskiya.

Eskiya has become a landmark film in the current revival of Turkish cinema and it was indeed the inspiration for our festival. Without this film the festival would not have been worth running because the arthouse films would not have generated the audience numbers needed to make the festival break even. The mass appeal of Eskiya in Turkey can be shown through the fact that at the time of its release it broke all box office records and brought audiences back to Turkish cinema.

The film depicts a Kurdish outlaw being released after decades in jail. He returns to his village in the mountains of the southeast only to find it under water after being dammed. Eskiya (‘the bandit’) then journeys to Istanbul to seek revenge on the man who betrayed him and stole his childhood sweetheart. In terms of narrative, themes and characterization, Eskiya is heavily influenced by an earlier period Turkish cinema, Yesilcam.(7) From its opening scenes of his village under water to Eskiya’s alienation in the big cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, the film is imbued with a deep sense of nostalgia and longing for a country that once was. Eskiya is also a story of migration from village to city and shows the bandit’s alienation in Istanbul; a notion that perhaps resonates for a group of migrants whose commonality is the act of migration. Eskiya therefore performs an ambivalent function. While at one level appealing to a sense of alienation that migrants may feel in a new land, it also simultaneously reaffirms the act of migration; showing a Turkey that has been irrevocably changed for the worse by the forces of globalisation and neo-liberalisation. In this way films in diasporic communities can weave slightly different narratives about the homeland than when viewed in their domestic environment and they may reinforce why the migrant left or alternatively hasten them to return ‘home’.

From Cultural paralysis to cultural Revival

The cultural paralysis evident throughout the 1980s and early 1990s is a far cry from the contemporary cultural revival that has swept Turkey and is particularly noticeable in its largest city. “Istanbul is one of the coolest cities in the world”, proclaimed the cover story of Newsweek’s European edition in August 2005. The Istanbul Biennale (September-October 2005) was further evidence of this dynamic, growing metropolis’ emerging artistic self-confidence.

In opposition to most countries’ filmmaking cultures that have suffered from globalization and neo-liberalism, Turkey’s seems to be thriving both commercially and artistically. This is occurring in parallel with alternative voices providing a counter to Turkey’s “hackneyed nationalist discourses”.(8) In the past, those aspects deemed both antithetical and a threat to the integrity of the Turkish nation-state – free artistic expression of cultural and ethnic diversity, a developing transnationalism and a public re-imagining of (traumatic) historical events, combined with an open, dynamic media sector – now constitute the primary strengths of filmmaking in Turkey.(9)

Domestically, the extraordinary resurgence in commercial film production over the last few years makes Turkish cinema a serious contender to Hollywood’s market dominance. Turkish films took 38 percent and 41 percent of their domestic box office in 2004 and 2005 respectively.(10) In the first quarter of 2006, Turkish films occupied five of the top-10 slots at the local box office.(11) Turkish film production has grown steadily since the mid-1990s, with 27 feature films released locally in 2005, up from 18 in 2004 and 16 in 2003. In 2004 G.O.R.A. achieved an all-time box-office record in Turkey of more than 4 million viewers (US$18.3m). This was eclipsed in 2006 by the anti-Iraq war film Kurtlar Vadisi – Iraq (Valley of the Wolves — Iraq) which made US$20 million.

Turkey’s artistic renaissance and emergence on the broader European cultural stage has been acknowledged through numerous prestigious awards won in recent years. In 2003, Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Golden Palm Award for his film Uzak (Distant, 2002). In that same year, Turkey (Sertab Erener) won the Eurovision Song Contest and, in 2004, Orhan Pamuk’s novel, My Name is Red, received great critical acclaim after winning the one of the world’s richest literature awards: Ireland’s IMPAC Dublin award. Meanwhile high-profile director Fatih Akin, who often exploits his Turkish migrant background and Istanbul as a setting in his films, became the first German director in 20 years to win the Berlin Film Festival in 2004 with his film, Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004). Head-On has recently gone on to win the 2006 Best Foreign Language Film award at the National Society of Film Critics in the United States. While this film is transnational in setting, moving between Hamburg and Istanbul, in terms of funding and origin there is no doubt it is German. However, through the exposure that Head-On, and his latest documentary, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005), have received, Akin has evidently put Istanbul and Turkey on the celluloid map.

The Turkish government is now making strategic attempts to fund and promote broader film culture. One way has been through the mounting of the new Eurasian Film Festival and Market, beside its 42-year-old Golden Orange counterpart in the Eastern Mediterranean city of Antalya. One of the new festival’s aims was to forge alliances between Turkish and foreign film producers and inspire future co-production activity. The Ministry of Culture has also established a new film fund targeted at producing primarily arthouse films that may garner prizes for Turkey at international festivals. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates (in competition at Cannes in 2006) was one of the films to benefit from the new funding. It was his award-winning Uzak (Distant) screened at more than 100 festivals around the world that convinced the Ministry to set up the fund.

This filmmaking resurgence has made the urgency of film festivals like the one we organized in 1998 now virtually redundant. Crowd-pleasers like Hababam Sinifi, GORA, Kurtlar Vadisi can be regularly viewed at a multiplex cinema in the western suburbs of Melbourne or Sydney, close to where the Turkish diaspora is located. However only occasionally do the prints come with English subtitles and one has to be part of the local community or access the Turkish-language press to know that they are on thus making them virtually inaccessible to non-Turkish Australians. These commercial Turkish films that bring in big audiences, while providing a counter to Hollywood domestically, will never become a part of mainstream Australian cinema-going. On the other side of the spectrum, arthouse films like Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates, Yesim Ustaoglu’s Beneath Clouds and Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge occasionally get a look-in at the big film festivals in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. In August this year the Brisbane International Film Festival had a special section devoted to women in Turkish and Iranian cinema. While Turkish cinema will never have the kind of niche market that is maintained by French cinema in Australia, it is no longer ‘out there on the edge’.

Notes:

1. Sections of this article have been previously published under the title: “Turkish Delights: Reflections on the Promotion and Reception of the first Turkish Film festival in Australia”, in Metro Magazine, 2000 No. 124/125 p. 60-63

2. See Catherine Simpson, ‘“_stanbul’da her _ey olabilir” or “Anything’s possible in Istanbul”’ for a detailed analysis of the staging of this event;

http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/film/Istanbul.html

3. The main sponsor for the Turkish film festival in Australia was Cathay Pacific.

4. Many Australians lost their lives when the ANZAC and Allied forces invaded Turkey. Despite this there is an on-going friendship on the basis that Australians were victims of the British incompetence and sacrificed while invading a foreign land.

5. See Tom O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London, p. 77.

6. Unlike Germany’s Turkish community, Australia’s remoteness to Turkey makes it more difficult for the community to maintain links with the homeland and access regular news and information. While satellite TV has changed this situation in the last few years, it still remains an issue. It is also expensive to travel between the two countries.

7. In the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, Istanbul was home to the prolific Yesilcam, the popular feature film industry which, at its height in 1968-74, pumped out 250-300 films per year, making it the third largest film industry in the world. Yesilcam (literally “green pine”) denotes a particular system of production-distribution-exhibition and takes its name from a street in the area of Beyoglu, Istanbul, where most of the production houses were located.

8. Asuman Suner, “Horror of a Different Kind: Dissonant Voices in the New Turkish Cinema”, Screen, Vol. 45, No. 4, Winter 2004, p. 305

9. See: Catherine Simpson“Turkish cinema’s resurgence: the deep nation unravels” in Senses of Cinema, vol 39, 2006 http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/39/turkish_cinema.html

10. Anna Franklin, “Local Pix boffo in Turkey”, Variety, 25 April 25 – 1 2005, p. 12

11. Anna Franklin, “Turks delight in local B.O. uptick”

May 1, 2006; http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117942244?categoryid=13&cs=1