New Turkish Documentaries: The Tools to Raise Public Awareness with Their Narrative Structures and Discourses

Abstract

Undoubtedly, NGOs, different ethnic and religious groups, political dissidents, and sexual orientations and identities convey the unseen images, unheard voices and unknown stories or buried narratives to the public sphere in the face of the mainstream media. Documentaries about buried narratives remind and recall people’s history against the conventional or mainstream one, and contribute to the social memory that seem to be realized only with their own narratives therefore act as an efficient tool to raise public awareness. Today, thanks to the digital technologies, cinema is no longer the privilege of certain people. Correspondingly, as for the documentaries, this leads to a change in their narrative structures and discourses besides a big rise in production numbers. In Turkey, documentaries which are open to self-representations with a much more subjective style are being produced, addressing issues such as history, politics, women’s issues, gender, identity and culture, urbanization, and environmental problems. Covering the aforementioned points and also considering the effect of political and social conjuncture, this paper assesses the “New Turkish Documentary” and examines its effectiveness to raise public awareness by exemplifying it with the documentaries “Küçük Kara Balıklar” (Little Black Fish, A. H. Ünal, C. Terbiyeli, E. Akay, S. Güler, Ö. İnce, 2014) which deals with the 1990’s Kurdish policy of Turkey through the testimony of children, “Yeryüzü Aşkın Yüzü Oluncaya Dek”(Love Will Change The Earth, R. Tuvi, 2014) which is related to Gezi Protests and “Komşu Komşu! Huuu!” (Hey Neighbour!, B. Elmas, 2014) which examines the process of urban transformation.



Author Information
Nihan Gider Isıkman, Baskent University, Turkey

Paper Information
Conference: EuroMedia2015
Stream: Documentary History

This paper is part of the EuroMedia2015 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window


Comments & Feedback

Place a comment using your LinkedIn profile

Comments

Share on activity feed

Powered by WP LinkPress

Share this Research

Posted by James Alexander Gordon