Yayın: Representing Ethnicity in Cinema during Turkey’s Kurdish Initiative: A Critical Analysis of My Marlon and Brando (Karabey, 2008), The Storm (Öz, 2008) and Future Lasts Forever (Alper, 2011)
Yükleniyor...
Tarih
2017
Yazarlar
Göztepe, Mustafa Orhan
Koçer, Zeynep
Dergi Başlığı
Dergi ISSN
Cilt Başlığı
Yayımcı
Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, Ireland
Özet
In 2009, the Turkish government started the “Kurdish Initiative”, a comprehensive policymaking
process, in an attempt to improve the democratic standards and civil rights of the Kurdish
population. Even though the initiative ended in 2015, it made it possible for a significant number of
independent films to emerge which deal with the Kurdish issue. Historically, mainstream cinema’s
symbolic representation of Kurdish identity served to neutralise its Kurdish characters by portraying
them as Turkish speaking and one-dimensional. Breaking this tradition, these independent films offer
multi-layered, Kurdish speaking characters with progressive narratives. This article investigates
three films produced on the eve of and during the “Kurdish Initiative”: My Marlon and Brando
(Gitmek: Benim Marlon ve Brandom, Hüseyin Karabey, 2008), The Storm (Bahoz, Kazım Öz, 2008)
and Future Lasts Forever (Gelecek Uzun Sürer, Özcan Alper, 2011). In addition to interrupting the
traditional acceptance of stereotypes by the mainstream cinema, each film discusses the symbolic
representations of Kurdish identity through different aspects: transnationality, the role of
discriminative processes, and memory and trauma.