When a Course Meets Public Film Screenings & a Conference

The Abbasi Program faculty affiliate Dr. Burcu Karahan (Turkish Language & Literature Lecturer, Comparative Literature) is teaching a course, entitled COMPLIT 102/302: Film Series: Understanding Turkey Through Film, in the 2017 Spring Quarter. Combining 6 film screenings with a conversation on Turkey's cultural, political and social transformation in the last decade, the course aims to help Stanford undergraduate and graduate students explore the pressing issues of globalization, gender and racial hierarchy, and neo-liberal urban transformation. Registered students are also required to attend three talks at the Abbasi Program's annual conference on Understanding Turkey: Vision, Revision, and the Future.

The film screenings are free and open to the public. Each screening will be followed by a discussion lead by invited scholars or film directors. The discussion aims to engage the students and general public in a conversation on how the directors and script writers responded to larger-scale cultural and social transformations and translated them into captivating personal stories. 

All films are in Turkish with English subtitles. The screening schedule is as follows:

April 6: My Father’s Wings (“Babamın Kanatları”, Dir. Kıvanç Sezer, 2016)
April 20: Majority (“Çoğunluk”, Dir. Seren Yüce, 2010)
April 27: Clair Obscur (“Tereddüt”, Dir. Yeşim Ustaoğlu, 2016)
April 29: The Last Schnitzel ("Son Şnitzel", Dir. Kaan Arıcı & İsmet Kurtuluş, 2017) -- screened as part of the annual conference
May 11: Dust Cloth (“Toz Bezi”, Dir. Ahu Öztürk. 2015)
May 25: Frenzy (“Abluka”, Dir. Emin Alper, 2015)

The film course is offered through the Department of Comparative Literature in collaboration with the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and a grant from the Stanford Arts.