Understanding Turkey Through Film

A new, one-unit course explores the pressing issues of the Republic of Turkey through a series of film screenings.

The course, COMPLIT 102/302: Understanding Turkey Through Film, combines six film screenings with a conversation on Turkey's cultural, political and social transformation in the last decade. Offered in the spring quarter and taught by Dr. Burcu Karahan, the course aims to help Stanford undergraduate and graduate students explore the pressing issues of globalization, gender and racial hierarchy, as well as neo-liberal urban transformation. Registered students are also required to attend three talks at the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies' annual conference on Understanding Turkey: Vision, Revision, and the Future.

The film screenings are free and open to the public and each will be followed by a discussion with scholars or film directors. The dialogue aims to engage the students and general public in a conversation about how the directors and script writers responded to larger-scale cultural and social transformations, and translated them into captivating personal stories. 

All films are in Turkish with English subtitles. The screening schedule is as follows:

April 6: My Father’s Wings (“Babamın Kanatları”, Dir. Kıvanç Sezer, 2016)
April 20: Majority (“Çoğunluk”, Dir. Seren Yüce, 2010)
April 27: Clair Obscur (“Tereddüt”, Dir. Yeşim Ustaoğlu, 2016)
May 11: Dust Cloth (“Toz Bezi”, Dir. Ahu Öztürk. 2015)
April 29: The Last Schnitzel ("Son Şnitzel", Dir. Kaan Arıcı & İsmet Kurtuluş, 2017), screened as part of the annual conference
May 25: Frenzy (“Abluka”, Dir. Emin Alper, 2015)

The course is offered through the Department of Comparative Literature in collaboration with the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and a grant from Stanford Arts.

For more information about the class, visit Explore Courses.