Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
HoMER Conference 2022 – Across Borders: Audiences, Exhibition And Reception, Rome, İtalya, 5 Temmuz - 08 Aralık 2022, ss.2-17
This
study focuses on the reception practices of the Turkish-speaking community in
London regarding the film Motherland (Ana Yurdu, 2015), directed
by Senem Tüzen. Ana Yurdu, which won awards at many festivals and was
praised by critics, is about a young woman's conflict with her conservative
mother and oppressive society. The film shares the characteristics of Turkish
art films with its story about intellectual characters who have returned to the
countryside and faced themselves and their past, and for its minimalist genre.
The film, which refers with its title to the motherland, mother's home, offers
a look at the themes of homeland, home, belonging, and identity from a
crossroads where different subject positions intersect as well. This film,
which is open to multiple readings, was screened to the Turkish community in
the scope of the 21st London Turkish Film Festival held online in 2016. In this
study, which was prepared based on the fieldwork conducted in London between
2019-2020 as a part of transnational film reception research, in-depth
interviews were conducted with four participants who watched the film Ana
Yurdu, and the interview data was analysed through interpretive
phenomenological analysis. The analyses indicated that the story of the film, which
tells about the oppressions on women in a conservative society was evaluated as
a “realistic representation” by the interviewees, but art films are perceived
as “boring”; although the interviewees' unstable heterogeneous conceptions of
identity (being a Turkish, British or even a world citizen) and ideological
views (being leftist) were effective in reception, fundamentally their gender
identities and the legal processes regulating their residence in England were
determinative, and these factors led to different readings. In addition, it has
been observed that the COVID-19 pandemic and the Brexit process are in charge
of shaping reception as contextual factors.