ABSTRACT
In an attempt to shift the ecocritical dialog on Turkey to the discipline of film studies and call the “male gaze” bias into question, this chapter explores the portrayal of Black Sea and Taurus mountain village women’s relationship to their changing natural and sociocultural environment in four fictional, semi-documentary, and documentary films produced in Turkey and distributed internationally during the last ten years. The comparative analysis of Yusuf Kurçenli’s Ask Your Heart (2010), Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds (2009), Pelin Esmer’s The Play (2006), and Suha Arın’s Fatma of the Forest (2010) evaluates the validity (or conversely, the fictionality) of these films’ images and messages about mountain village women’s daily work (and play) in their immediate natural environment, and compares them briefly to common images of and “truisms” about Anatolian village women developed in twentieth-century Turkish popular, nationalistic, and academic discourses.
