Pazar – Bir Ticaret Masalı (The Market – A Tale of Trade, 2008) is the latest feature film of English director Ben Hopkins. The film is a Turkish, German, British and Kazakh co-production shot in Turkish. In 2008, it won four Golden Oranges in the categories of Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Costume Design. The story revolves around the ambitious attempts of Mihram, a small time black marketer living in a village near Turkey-Azerbaijan border, to make money and to better his life. To collect the required money to open a shop selling cell phones, a market that seems to be considerably profitable, Mihram attempts to turn the local doctor’s need for a medicine into his advantage and to find that medicine travels to Azerbaijan.
Pazar – Bir Ticaret Masalı does not only shed light on a familiar and fundamental story taking place around the eastern borders of Turkey but also on the dynamics of the capitalist market. The significance of the film for my concern rather rises from the fact that the film highlights an important point within the debates about the notion of Turkish cinema.
Halit Refiğ was among the first names who came up with the idea of generating a distinctive and authentic national cinematic style. He argued that Turkish cinema should be formulated through recourse to the Turkish history and tradition reflecting the so-called essence of Turkish-ness. However, this view could not gain a wide recognition and Turkish cinema was conceptualized for a long time as the bunch of films that are shot and produced in Turkey, in Turkish, by Turkish directors, actors and actresses. Such a conception of Turkish cinema prevailed particularly in the period of Yeşilçam.
In the course of time, the dynamics of globalization introduced new dimensions into the debates of Turkish cinema. The emergence of co-productions and migrant or transnational directors are among those prevailing points of interrogation. The possibility of a purely Turkish cinema was questioned since the processes and conditions of production extended to include various geographies. Actually, the necessity and relevancy of national cinema as an analytical category has also started to be discussed worldwide following these developments. For instance the category of “Foreign Film” was replaced by the category of “Best Film in Foreign Language” in the Oscar awards.
In the light of these discussions, Pazar – Bir Ticaret Masalı, as a film about Turkey shot and produced by foreign directors and producers, evokes the same old question: What is Turkish cinema? Can Pazar – Bir Ticaret Masalı be considered as a Turkish film? Or should we really leave aside the question of national cinema?
Bahar Emgin
Cinema in Turkey 