The Turkish film industry

The Turkish film industry has had a long life, dating from 1914, when Fuat Uzkinay (who was later involved in the Army Cinema Department, created in 1917) made the documentary, The Destruction of the Russian Monument in Agia Stefanos. Films had first been screened in Turkey as early as 1897, and the first motion picture theatre was built in 1908.

From 1923 to 1939, Turkish cinema went through a "theatre period," when stage directors and actors, such as Muhsin Ertugrul, dominated the industry, making films during the off-season from the theatre. The first Turkish sound film was Istanbul's Streets, made in 1932 by Ipek Film Studio Company, which was to produce six sound films in the 1932-1933 period. Ipek, along with Halil Kamil operated the two major pre-Second World War Turkish studios, which supplied product for the country's 155 theatres.

During the Second World War, European films were not screened in Turkey, and Egyptian cinema was dominant. However, in the postwar years, Egyptian films were banned, and the Turkish film industry grew from eight production companies in 1948 to twenty in 1959. Similarly, the number of Turkish films proliferated, from sixteen in 1949 to twenty-three in 1959. By the seventies the country was producing an average of two hundred features a year, and its seven hundred and fifty winter theatres and two thousand summer theatres constituted an important market for American films. By the eighties the situation had deteriorated through the advent of television, and the country's film output was largely limited to sex-oriented productions.

Censorship has been strictly enforced in the Turkish film industry since 1936. The winner of the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film festival, Susuz Yaz/The Dry Summer ( 1965), directed by Metin Erksan, had to be smuggled out of the country because of censorship problems.

"Young Turkish Cinema" was a movement within the industry from 1961 onwards, and among the directors associated with it are Ertem Görec, Ömer Kavur , Ali Ozgentürk, and Yilmaz Güney. The last had been an actor and he continued making films from political imprisonment until his death in 1985; his memorable features are Umut/Hope (1971) and Yol ( 1983), which was written in prison by Güney and directed by Şerif Gönen.