ABSTRACT
The relationship between the Republic of Turkey and its founder is usually compared to that between a son and his father. If that is the case, then Mustafa may be considered the growing pains of Turkey. When we decided to make a movie that would embrace Atatürk with all his authenticity, we could anticipate the reactions we would receive because Atatürk was a taboo, hidden more and more to ‘meet the needs’ with each military coup. He resembled a giant statue smeared in lies, its original appearance obscured. Every nation needs such dogmas during the process of nationalization but there were two handicaps in the case of Atatürk. First of all, the dogma lasted too long; it was meaningless that after 70 years of his passing, he was still commemorated with the same stereotypes, hidden and censored. Second, it was created despite himself. He was one of the rarest leaders, who was able to say ‘I’m leaving no dogmas behind’, and this was what distinguished him, prevented him from freezing in time, and kept him alive for all these years. It was a betrayal to him to deify such a leader as himself. Our idea was simple: to chip off the statue-like cast that had been built afterwards, made firm with each coup, protected by law. It was to bring him ‘closer’, to bring him ‘from the sky down to earth’, to touch him with cordiality and love, to reach his true identity with the help of texts which were written by him. But the work we were trying to complete took a laborious and dangerous turn in relation to the thickness of the plaster of the statue and the weight of the idolization. We focused on first-hand documents during the preparation phase of the movie: we obtained notebooks that had never left his pockets, letters, circulars, notes that he made on the corners of the pages of the books he read. The Atatürk we found there was much different from the one we had been told about. He said things we had never heard about the Kurdish problem, brought new approaches to topics regarding the Prophet, talked about a night he spent in the arms of a woman, or the negligence of Turkish doctors regarding his health. With great surprise, we came to see that these lines had been censored and hidden as they carried the risk of going against the history built later on, or damaging the statue that was built after his passing.
