Cinematic Geography of the Countryside, Childhood, and Nostalgia: Remembering Ahmet Uluçay in the Age of Oblivion
This article focuses on the experiences of Anatolia’s childhood, countryside, and
cinema through the life of Turkish film-maker Ahmet Uluçay who was born, grow
up in a small town and died there at 55 age in 2009 and through his only feature
film Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds (2004). The story of two children who want to
make cinema is narrated in the film that is Uluçay’s autobiographical work.
According to the narrative, childhood is full of both the purest dreams and the
deepest disappointments of human memory. As for the country, it is
simultaneously the spatial equivalent of escape and being isolated. Ahmet Uluçay
is a turning point of the New Turkish Cinema that highlights low-budget and
minimalist human stories, so much so that, although he does not have many films,
has been shown as a lecture in cinema schools in the country. Stories, characters,
values, and language in Uluçay’s works are nourished entirely from his geography.
Despite this, there are no sufficient foreign-language academic papers on it. This
study, which on the one hand tries to meet the deficit, on the other hand, seeks an
answer to the question of how cinema, childhood, memory, and the country
construct each other.
