Films often act as a prism that refracts the issues facing a nation, and Turkish cinema in particular serves to encapsulate the cultural and social turmoil of modern-day Turkey. Acclaimed film scholar Gönül Dönmez-Colin examines here the way that national cinema reveals the Turkish quest for a modern identity. Marked by continually shifting ethnic demographics, politics, and geographic borders, Turkish society struggles to reconcile modern attitudes with traditional morals and centuries-old customs. Dönmez-Colin examines how contemporary Turkish filmmakers address this struggle in their cinematic works, positing that their films revolve around ideas of migration and exile, and give voice to previously subsumed “denied identities” such as that of the Kurds. Turkish Cinema also crucially examines how these films confront taboo subjects such as homosexuality, incest, and honor killings, issues that have only become viable subjects of discussion in the new generation of Turkish citizens. A deftly written and thought-provoking study, Turkish Cinema will be invaluable for scholars of Middle East studies and cinephiles alike.

Victor Nunez writes and directs this noirish, Florida-set drama. Timothy Olyphant stars as Sonny Mann, an ex-con who is released early from a three-year prison sentence and returns to his home town in the hope of turning over a new leaf and putting the past firmly behind him. There he makes contact with his former best friend Dave (Josh Brolin), who is now a police officer married to Sonny's old flame Ann (Sarah Wynter). However, despite his resolution to lead a quiet life, Sonny soon finds himself in trouble once again as both his criminal past and his unresolved feelings for Ann catch up with him.

Introduction -- CONFIGURATIONS OF STEREOTYPES AND IDENTITIES: NEW METHODOLOGIES. Daniela Berghahn: My big fat Turkish wedding: from culture clash to romcom -- David Gramling: The oblivion of influence: mythical realism in Feo Alada's When we leave -- Marco Abel: The minor cinema of Thomas Arslan: a prolegomenon -- MULTIPLE SCREENS AND PLATFORMS: FROM DOCUMENTARY AND TELEVISION TO INSTALLATION ART. Angelica Fenner: Roots and routes of the diasporic documentarian: a psychogeography of Fatih Akin's We forgot to go back -- Ingeborg Majer-O'Sickey: Gendered kicks: Buket Alakus's and Aysun Bademsoy's soccer films -- Nilgan Bayraktar: Location and mobility in Kutlu Ataman's site-specific video installation Kuba -- Brent Peterson: Turkish for beginners: teaching cosmopolitanism to Germans -- Brad Prager: "Only the wounded honor fights": Zili Alada's rage and the drama of the Turkish German perpetrator -- INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS: STARS, THEATERS, AND RECEPTION. Randall Halle: The German Turkish spectator and Turkish language film programming: Karli Kino, maximum distribution, and the interzone cinema -- Berna Gueneli: Mehmet Kurtulu and Birol Ünel: Sexualized masculinities, normalized ethnicities -- Karolin Machtans: The perception and marketing of Fatih Akin in the German press -- Ayìa Tunì Cox: Hyphenated identities: the reception of Turkish-German cinema in the Turkish daily press -- THE CINEMA OF FATIH AKIN: AUTHORSHIP, IDENTITY, AND BEYOND. Mine Eren: Cosmopolitan filmmaking: Fatih Akin's In July and Head-on -- Roger Hillman and Vivien Silvey: Remixing Hamburg: transnationalism in Fatih Akin's Soul kitchen -- Deniz Gukturk: World cinema goes digital: looking at Europe from the other shore.

The first critical and analytical dictionary of Turkish Cinema, this book provides a comprehensive overview of Turkish cinema from its beginnings to the present day. Addressing the lacuna in scholarly work on the topic, this dictionary provides immense detail on a wide range of aspects of Turkish cinema including; prominent filmmakers, films, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, producers, significant themes, genres, movements, theories, production modes, film journals, film schools and professional organizations. Extensively researched, elaborately detailed and written in a remarkably readable style, the Routledge Dictionary of Turkish Cinema will be invaluable for film scholars and researchers as a reference book and as a guide to the dynamics of the cinema of Turkey.

Mencutekin takes on the role of ideology in the history of Turkish cinema critically analyzing the values and ideas that have shaped the message and stories of Turkish movies. This study is based on the thesis that to truly explore the specific issues currently vexing Turkish cinema, one has to confront the aesthetic, technological, and ideological assumptions in the deeply nationalistic and secular approach to Turkish cinema and how they engage with the real social values of Turkish society. If one hopes to attain a cinema purified from all kinds of crisis, more democracy is required to create a cinema that is at peace with the past, present, and future of Turkish society.

This volume presents varied approaches concerning the relation between cinema and politics which focus on policies, eras, countries, mainstream and art cinema productions, transnational examples, changing narratives and identities. Both cinema and politics have actors and directors for their scenes, and in this sense their discourses intermingle. The performances of the “actors/actresses” in both arenas attract particular attention. The actors, directors, and producers with ‘hyphenated/creolised/hybrid identities’ such as German-Turks, directors of Balkan cinema, or Italian filmmakers of Turkish origin give a wide and refreshing perspective to the discussion of Europe in the media. What these ‘mediated identities’ represent goes beyond the limits of the old Europe, towards the different sensitivity of the New Europe. Scholars and advanced students of Film Studies, European Studies, Identity Politics, Migration / Emigration and Gender Studies will find this volume of integral importance to their work.

As in western cinema, cross-dressing is a recurrent theme in Turkish film. But what do these films, whose characters typically cross-dress in order to escape enemies or other threats, tell us about the modern history of the Turkish Republic? This book examines cross-dressing in Turkish films in the context of formative events in modern Turkish political history, arguing that this trope coincides with and is illustrative of trauma induced by Turkey's multiple coup d'etats, periods of authoritarianism, enforced secularism and 'modernization'. Burcu Dabak Ozdemir analyses five case study films wherein she reveals that cross-dressing characters are able to escape persecutors and surveillance - key instruments of oppression during Turkey's coups. She shows how cross-dressing in the films examined become a destabilising force, a form of implicit resistance against state power, both political and in terms of binaries of gender and identity, and a means to register moments of national trauma. The book historicises the concept of cross-dressing in modern Turkey by examining what the author argues is a formative trauma worked through in the films examined: the westernization policies of the Kemalist regime whose most immediate symbolic presence was worn - the enforced adoption of western dress by citizens. Of interest to scholars of gender, queer, film and trauma studies, the book will also appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Turkish culture and society.