Nostalgia for an Imaginary Home: Memory, Space, and Identity in the New Turkish Cinema

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s we have been witnessing the emergence of a “new Turkish cinema.” A number of young directors, among them Zeki Demirkubuz, Derviş Zaim, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Serdar Akar, and Nuri Bilge Ceyhan, made their first feature films during this period and have proved to be quite prolific since then. Acclaimed by critics in Turkey and abroad, recent Turkish films have received invitations from major international festivals and have won prestigious awards. The new Turkish cinema has also generated its own brand of audience. While Turkish films had largely disappeared from theaters for most of the 1980s due to severe economic adversities in the film industry, local viewers had, in any case, distanced themselves from Turkish cinema on the grounds of its presumed “banality,” the term “Turkish film” having become almost synonymous with “bad taste” for a decade prior to the arrival of the new Turkish cinema. Since the 1990s, however, Turkish films have once again begun to attract audiences to theaters, signaling that the long lost reputation of Turkish cinema may have been restored.