• Politics

There has been no better chronicler of this transformation than Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The Turkish auteur, a longtime darling of the Cannes Film Festival, has never openly referenced politics in his films, but taken together, his body of work forms one of the most compelling accounts available of what has become of Turkey under Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).

In his films, Ceylan asks what it means to lead an ethical life in Turkey today. But his protagonists provide unsavory answers, suggesting that doing so may no longer be possible in this transformed country. Instead, they put on a frightening display of the values that the AKP has imprinted upon Turkish society: an unwavering focus on self-interest and self-enrichment, a blindness to the pains of others, and a consistent disdain for anyone who seeks to lead a life on ethical lines.

A scene from Distant (2002), Ceylan’s first film set in Istanbul.Big World Pictures

Cocoon takes place in the rapidly Islamizing Turkey of the 1990s. It opens with photographs from the 1940s of a married couple, played by Ceylan’s parents. At that time, they were living in the secular, republican nation-state that decades of Ataturk’s rigorous political and cultural reforms had built. Viewed 50 years on, they seemed young and hopeful, like remnants of a dying culture on its last legs.

Ceylan explored this shift in a four-part series. His feature debut, The Small Town (1997), tells one town’s story in the mid-1990s through the eyes of children who often take pleasure in the demise and pain of others. In one scene, a young boy flips a turtle on its back, believing nobody is watching. The boy, in a sense, foreshadows the ethos of New Turkey: He lacks guilt or a recognition of moral failure.

Ceylan’s characters, preoccupied with self-interest and personal gain, embody the homo economicus model of behavior that proliferated during Turgut Ozal’s era of neoliberalism. As prime minister (1983-1989) and president (1989-1993), Ozal sought to insert Turkey into the global economy—a legacy Erdogan inherited and radically expanded upon. While Reaganism and Thatcherism swept across the United States and the United Kingdom, Ozal implemented similar reforms geared toward privatization, deregulation, and market liberalization. The measures created rapid economic growth in the short term but came at the cost of rising inequality and suppression of labor unions. It soon became clear that to succeed in this dog-eat-dog economy, Turks had to embrace extractive, profit-obsessed means of making a living.

The primary tension at play in The Small Town—and the rest of the quartet—is between cynicism and idealism. Ceylan’s nephew, Mehmet Emin Toprak, plays an idealistic youth named Saffet who dreams of leaving for Istanbul due to widespread unemployment in rural Anatolia. In Clouds of May (1999), we see Saffet learn that he has failed his college entry exams—his only opportunity for leaving provincial Turkey. Saffet’s cousin Muzaffer, who returns to make a film about his hometown Canakkale, takes advantage of Saffet’s desperation, overpromising and underdelivering to get what he wants. In Ceylan’s world, dreamers like Saffet are objects to be extracted, used, and discarded by cynics who know what it takes to survive in harsh economic conditions.

The cynics and dreamers return in Distant (2002), Ceylan’s first film set in Istanbul, where Erdogan built his networks before ascending to national prominence in that year’s general elections. In Ceylan’s films, Istanbul is a metonym for the self-interested heart of New Turkey. It attracts dreamers hoping to find better job opportunities, which comes at a moral price.

The final film of the quartet, Climates (2006), offer glimpses of Turkey’s rapidly changing mid-2000s cultural scene. The film’s protagonist wanders through the bohemian quarter along rich, bustling thoroughfares and well-stocked bookshops, and he visits film sets where his partner works in the booming television drama industry. There is an infectious optimism and desire for democratic awakening everywhere he goes.

At the time, Turkey really was modernizing. The early 2000s, under the stewardship of prime minister Erdogan, was an era of individual success stories, epitomized and glamorized by cultural firsts, such as Sertab Erener, the first Turkish winner of the Eurovision Song Contest (2003), and Orhan Pamuk, the first Turkish Nobel Laureate (2006). Star architects and artists abounded. Turkey’s first modern art museum opened in 2004, in the neighborhood where Climates takes place.

This flourishing culture was largely financed and publicized by the Turkish government as part of its strategy to promote tourism. It was the New Turkey that Erdogan had promised: Unmoored from its foundations as a secularist social state, the country was increasingly defined by entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency. Having a good education and strong ethical values would no longer count as it did in Ataturk’s old Turkey.

A scene from Winter Sleep (2014).Adopt Films

Soon cynicism about integrity and the values of Ataturk’s old Turkey—much of it justified, much of it exaggerated—gave way to a deeper moral rot. As the state cracked down on dissent, ever more people devised ways to trick others, as well as themselves, to legitimize and further enrich their selfish lives.

The central figure of Winter Sleep (2014), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is Aydin, a former actor who spends his days walking by ancient ruins and handpicking mushrooms in Cappadocia but in private is a despot.

One day, the child of the tenant he is trying to evict purposely throws a stone at Aydin’s Land Rover, shattering the front window. The underprivileged boy is one of Ceylan’s truth-tellers: equally feared and resented by the cynical Aydin because of his refusal to play by Aydin’s rules. In another scene, the boy’s father throws stacks of banknotes that Aydin’s wife has given him as charity into a fire to show how little he cares for money and its power.

In Ceylan’s universe, idealist Turks are underprivileged and disenfranchised, but they end up morally on top. They speak truth to those in power even when it risks financial ruin. In the real world, however, truth tellers in Turkey today are more likely to be punished for their morals than valorized for them—as seen in the cases of Osman Kavala and Selahattin Demirtas, imprisoned because of their efforts for social equality and democratization.

Ceylan’s last two films head to the countryside outside Istanbul to further probe the lives of frustrated men. In The Wild Pear Tree (2018), recent college graduate Sinan tries to navigate Turkey during the mid-2010s economic crisis. His dreams of becoming a teacher are dashed because of the increased backlog of education graduates waiting to be appointed to state schools. Reeling from this disappointment, Sinan jokes that he’d “drop an atomic bomb on this town if I were a dictator.”

Since the attempted coup in 2016, Erdogan’s regime has been defined by its highly securitized policies and an inordinate obsession with Turkey’s so-called internal enemies. Purges of civil servants and mass arrests of opposition activists and politicians have become commonplace. Sinan’s college friend advises him to join the riot police, beating Marxists and feminists during rallies against government oppression in return for a handsome salary. Sinan laughs at the idea. But he recognizes that he’d be lucky to even land the job of beating dissidents, given the dour economic climate and severe youth unemployment bred by Erdogan’s unorthodox economic policies. Like many in his generation, Sinan feels fated for a life of poverty and unrealized dreams.

A scene from About Dry Grasses (2023).Cannes Film Festival

Ceylan’s latest film, On Dry Grasses (2023), is the darkest in his oeuvre. Samet, a teacher, resides in an eastern Anatolian village. Amid worsening economic conditions, it has become near impossible for middle-class Turks to travel abroad. Samet tells his students that their education has no point, as they’ll all die in their hometowns with no experience or knowledge of other parts of the world. Instead of fostering friendships with locals, Samet befriends a military commander overseeing the town. They wile away their time playing video games and complaining about locals.

It’s an indictment of Erdogan’s broken promises to make Turkey a more prosperous and less isolated country, one that would join the European Union and be tied to the West. From the mid-2010s onwards, Erdogan has instead used his public speeches to antagonize the West and stoke resentment among his base.

In all his films, Ceylan captures Turkey’s shift from a forward-looking, potentially democratic country in the mid-2000s to a burgeoning autocracy in the mid-2010s, where cynicism is the last refuge for many. There is no hope for Muzaffer the director, Aydin the actor, or Samet the teacher, as they feel they can no longer lead a fulfilling, ethical existence. The country’s financial collapse has gone hand-in-hand with a loss of belief in any meaningful sense of a good life; the only option available is to mock those whose lives retain hope and higher purpose.

A scene from The Small Town (1997), Ceylan’s feature debut.Zeyno Film

As they map the inner landscapes of a wide range of Turkish characters, Ceylan’s films never openly reference Turkish politics. Yet in recent years, their crews and casts have begun speaking out against Erdogan’s policies in public. In 2014, Ceylan dedicated his Palme d’Or to the young people of Turkey, especially those killed during anti-government protests the previous year. In 2015, he joined more than 100 filmmakers who published a letter accusing the Turkish government of “oppression and censorship.”

Ceylan’s actors have also been subject to the country’s increasing illiberalism. Nadir Saribacak of Winter Sleep moved abroad after a pro-government broadcaster cut off his speech at the 2015 Antalya Film Festival in which he said, “I have problems related to the country,” and proclaimed his love for friends “from different religions, languages, races, sects.” In February, Melisa Sozen, also from Winter Sleep, was questioned by Turkish police on suspicion of “promoting terrorist propaganda.”

Though he does make occasional public pronouncements, Ceylan largely lets his work do the speaking for him. His films show how people from all walks of life can justify choices that lead to injustice and violence, cynically accepting that it’s human nature to act in pursuit of self-interest.

In recent months, this is what the Turkish people have been asked to do—mind their own business as the Turkish government arrested the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, whose politics of hope and social democratic ideals have run against the prevalent cynicism and opportunism of New Turkey. In prosecuting Imamoglu and a growing number of elected administrators of other major Turkish cities on charges of corruption, the government is attempting to solidify the cynicism at the crux of its ideology: There’s no use in seeking moral purity, since only the powerful and the ruthless survive in today’s Turkey.