BİR TÜRK’E GÖNÜL VERDİM

Eva, from Germany, searches for the former “Gastarbeiter” (guest worker) İsmail in his Turkish hometown Kayseri. She hopes to build a future with her former lover and her son. When İsmail rejects both her and their child, the villager Mustafa takes on the humiliated and helpless woman. Eva falls in love with the good-natured Anatolian and soon starts to take up the ways of the village women. Only after this does İsmail become envious and attempts to win back the German woman and their son by any means possible.

Around the middle of the 1960s, the filmmaker Halit Refiğ (1934 - 2009) put into practise his own version of a “National Cinema” through Ulusal Sinema. He developed it as a reaction to the contemporary Turkish film critics who wanted Turkish cinema to emulate the European model. With more than 60 films and numerous series, Refiğ attempts to distinguish and elevate Turkey’s own culture above the West. Refiğ’s films and texts for “Ulusal Sinema“ functioned as a source of inspiration for several generations of classical film-makers in Turkey.