The Dreamers and Cynics of the New Turkey

Kaya Genc

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Over the past three decades—22 years of it under the rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan—Turkey has transformed from a secular society searching for its spiritual identity to an increasingly self-confident, self-interested, and self-aggrandizing one. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s republican, Europeanizing, old Turkey has given way to what the governing party has christened “New Turkey.”

There has been no better chronicler of this transformation than Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The Turkish auteur, a longtime darling of the Cannes Film Festival, has never openly referenced politics in his films, but taken together, his body of work forms one of the most compelling accounts available of what has become of Turkey under Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).

In his films, Ceylan asks what it means to lead an ethical life in Turkey today. But his protagonists provide unsavory answers, suggesting that doing so may no longer be possible in this transformed country. Instead, they put on a frightening display of the values that the AKP has imprinted upon Turkish society: an unwavering focus on self-interest and self-enrichment, a blindness to the pains of others, and a consistent disdain for anyone who seeks to lead a life on ethical lines.

A scene from Distant (2002), Ceylan’s first film set in Istanbul.Big World Pictures

Ceylan’s debut short film, Cocoon (1995), was released just over a year after Erdogan’s election as Istanbul’s mayor. A former semi-professional football player, Erdogan made his name as mayor by cleaning up the Golden Horn waterway and resolving some of the city’s longtime problem areas: water, transportation, air pollution, and waste management. His efficiency in these matters provided him with enough political capital to begin a broader project of eroding Turkey’s secular foundations. The outwardly pious leader quietly banned alcohol from city-run public spaces and injected his speeches with anti-Western messaging, promising to make Turkey Islamic again.

Cocoon takes place in the rapidly Islamizing Turkey of the 1990s. It opens with photographs from the 1940s of a married couple, played by Ceylan’s parents. At that time, they were living in the secular, republican nation-state that decades of Ataturk’s rigorous political and cultural reforms had built. Viewed 50 years on, they seemed young and hopeful, like remnants of a dying culture on its last legs.

Ceylan explored this shift in a four-part series. His feature debut, The Small Town (1997), tells one town’s story in the mid-1990s through the eyes of children who often take pleasure in the demise and pain of others. In one scene, a young boy flips a turtle on its back, believing nobody is watching. The boy, in a sense, foreshadows the ethos of New Turkey: He lacks guilt or a recognition of moral failure.

Ceylan’s characters, preoccupied with........

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