Representation of Labourers and the Labour Problem in the Late Turkish Cinema

Abstract

Since its beginnings, in Turkish cinema, due to various excuses, labourers have remained to be the invisible subject”, and their troubles to be the ignored problems. In the films featuring the labourer protagonist, on the other hand, the labourers are discussed in a melodramatic approach excluding their concrete economic problems and more within love or tragic family relationships. Even though an interest in labourers and their problems awakens in the first half of 1960s within the atmosphere of freedom the New Constitution provided, this interest lasts short, and after a period of stop, it wakes up again, but disappears completely following 1980 military intervention. While about twenty films addressing to the labour problem are produced from 1962 to the end of 1980, within the thirty years from that date until 2010, only three feature length films are produced. This indifference to labourers and their problems comes to a new breaking point with the film Zerre directed in 2012. This film is followed by Dust Cloth in 2015 and My Father’s Wings in 2016.