ABSTRACT
Turkish cinema went through a significant process of change during the 1990s when a number of rising directors began depicting the suffocations of marginalized people in their low-budget minimalistic films. The films of the period, canonized as “New Cinema of Turkey”, or “New Turkish Cinema”, continually revolve around the issues of home(land), and “reveal tensions, anxieties, and dilemmas around the questions of belonging, identity and memory in contemporary Turkish society”. 1 In these films, home is not the haven that it used to be in the earlier Turkish cinema, but a dwelling of trauma, violence and horror. The works of the directors of the new cinema are thus often associated with the themes of homelessness, home-seeking and/or homecomings, and with aesthetic emphases on claustrophobic interiors and liminal spaces. Considering the political, economic and contemporary social climate of Turkey, their works might be taken as a response to, or a projection of, the post-junta transition in the homeland. Home is often portrayed as an uncanny figure, a locus of threat and horror as it is immersed in (mostly gender-based) violence and crime. 2
