|
"The
injured Yara, " is the history of a young Turkish woman in Germany suddenly
brought back by his parents to Anatolia.
"Lola e Bilidikid" narrates about a homosexual boy in Berlin, the double
segregation, both ethnic and sexual, as an existential condition. "Dangerous
jump in a hearse " (Tabutta Rovasata) outlines the vicissitudes of suffering
from Sida, in a night and suburban Istanbul, some brutal but some way
sympathetic. "Travel to sun " (Gnese Yolkuluk) is the travel of a Kurd
in the Turkish society ", denied identity and found again, the will
to belong to a nation without rejecting one's own roots.
The young Turkish movie gets to the screens and raises polemics. But,
save some specificities, it could be the new European movie, from Rome
Paris or from Berlin or Madrid. Loneliness, segregation, drug, metropolitan
anxieties, research for a meaning of belonging... These are the classic
topics of a mass and secularised society, whose religious element keeps
at the background, and if it comes out, manifests itself in a private
way, as inward research and not as the militancy of faith. For the countries
of the old continent it is a fact, for Turkey it is the proof, once
more, of a unicity that alienates her from world that geographically
rounds her, and nevertheless that she wants to belong to.
It's not an early process; it is not framed only in the modernization
violent as and electroshock that Ataturk administrated to the Turkey
state, just born in the twenties. At the middle of the nineteenth century,
Istanbul has international school institutions, student melting pots
for the nationalist that in the following years will break on several
occasions the Ottoman Empire.
At
the end of the century, most population is Christian, there is the political
exiles immigration from Europe, Hungary, Poland, Italian that find shelter
here from the repression in their origin countries. Forty-nine are the
newspapers issued, thirteen in Turkish language, nine in Greek and Armenian,
seven in French, three in Bulgarian, two in Hebrew and English, one
in Arabic, ladino, German and Persian.
Constitution
enacted in 1876 is the first modern constitution in a Muslim country.
Philip Mansel, the author of "Costantinopoli", is right in noting, "
Ataturk's reformations revealed themselves effectiveness in order to
the Ottoman modernization century. The sizeable measures he adopted
have been already debated since 1908 by the young Turkeys, while others,
as the limitation of Islam to the private sphere and the elimination
of the veil for women, had been already enacted by the town elites ".
At
the end, the cosmopolitism worn away the empire, stressing the elements
that provoked its fall. It wasn't the cause nevertheless, quite more
complex and historical and political grounded, of the decay of the leading
class that if we wanted to narrate it will bring us too far. Surely
instead it prepared the passage to the new world, it contributed, by
that mix of faiths, religions, uses, by the aware acceptance of diversity,
by the respect of other's choices, to eliminate any defensiveness, just
for that cultural and existential "feature" was natural since origins.
|
