The crisis in Turkey’s film industry

The crisis in Turkey’s film industry arose from more than a shortage of money: political violence kept audiences away, censorship narrowed what filmmakers could make, and commercial pressures pushed production toward work that could be financed and released. The account traces these forces from the fading crowds of the late 1970s to the success of Broken Lives, whose popularity briefly revived cinema-going and transformed Kemal Basmacı’s standing in the film world.

Political violence and the shrinking audience

As Turkey moved toward civil conflict, bombs and street battles made evening outings increasingly dangerous. Families stopped venturing out, and cinema attendance fell sharply. The decline damaged an industry that had taken pride in its claim to be the world’s third largest, after Hollywood and India. Even respected filmmakers struggled to find either audiences or backers, while the market filled with sex films and fight films.

The change was visible in the contrast between the cinemas and the bars frequented by film workers. The Pelür Bar where Füsun Received an Acting Offer remained crowded even as films lost their audiences. Kemal learned that unemployment had driven the film crowd to drink: work had become scarce, and professionals who once gathered around cinema projects now spent their evenings in the bar. Many tried to survive by making commercials or taking work on the new, more sensational productions. In the account, the crowded bar is not evidence of a healthy industry but a measure of how its workers had been displaced from film production.

The decline also had a cultural cost. A society-column clipping warned that families’ fear of going out had deprived even the most esteemed cineastes of audiences and financial support. It called for wealthy businessmen to invest in art films, while also mocking the earlier fashion for rich patrons to use supposedly artistic productions as a way to meet actresses. The column claimed that a newer kind of patron wanted to turn a woman he already loved into a star. Its portrait of a jealous society bachelor who could not bring himself to put a commissioned film into production closely reflected Kemal’s entanglement of private attachment and filmmaking. The industry crisis therefore appears both as a structural problem and as a setting in which money, artistic ambition, and intimate desire become difficult to separate.

Censorship, permissions, and the meaning of a ready script

Financial uncertainty was compounded by state control. Hayal Hayati regarded censorship as tolerable when it merely required cuts: a reduced film could still reach cinemas and recover its investment if audiences could follow it. An outright ban, by contrast, could ruin a production. The state was consequently persuaded to divide review into two stages, beginning with approval of a screenplay’s subject and scene content before filming.

That process generated its own bureaucracy. Filmmakers needed permissions, and a network of agents and agencies emerged to guide applications; bribery had become part of the system. In the spring of 1977, Kemal and Feridun considered which agent to use for Blue Rain at Lemon Films. A screenplay described in industry language as ready had already passed the Board or obtained the permissions thought necessary for release. Because few popular scripts survived censorship intact, directors and producers dependent on making one or two films a year might accept a ready project even if they had little interest in it.

The pressure also shaped the content of films. The Board’s repeated smoothing and cutting, as Kemal describes it, helped make productions increasingly uniform, removing the prickly or original elements that might distinguish one from another. Demir the Typewriter offered a practical response: he rewrote scripts to soften conflicts and blunt criticism, while adding reassuring references to the flag, the nation, Atatürk, and Allah. His service was sought even by large companies that already bribed censors, because his revisions could make a screenplay both safer and more palatable. The system thus constrained film at several points: through official approval, informal payments, and the careful revision of stories before production.

Commercial compromise and the making of Broken Lives

In January 1981, Feridun told Kemal he had a screenplay ready to film and wanted to work on it rather than continue making commercials solely for money. The proposed story was an unattractive fit for Füsun: it required a revealing role and included a plot in which a young woman, after being seduced and abandoned by a wealthy man, seeks revenge by becoming a singer. Its songs had been written for Papatya, and the project had been abandoned by Hayal Hayati after Papatya refused to submit to his demands.

Kemal recognized that the screenplay and songs were poor and that the project did not suit Füsun. Nevertheless, he agreed to finance it, partly because he hoped to make Feridun happy. That decision placed personal loyalty alongside commercial calculation: the producer’s money could keep a film moving, but it did not give the production a strong artistic premise. In May 1981, Feridun began shooting Broken Lives, borrowing the title of Halit Ziya’s eighty-year-old novel while making a film whose setting and story bore little resemblance to it. The movie followed a woman played by Papatya who becomes famous for performing love songs in gazinos while patiently planning revenge on the man who took her virginity. Unlike the heroine of the novel, the film’s protagonist is unhappy not because she is married but because she cannot marry.

Production relied on familiar methods of musical melodrama. Filming began in the old Peri Cinema, where the seats had been removed and tables installed to make the theatre resemble a gazino. These venues had long provided a setting for singers, performances, and the public display of emotional suffering. Older productions could fill such scenes with real singers and spectators willing to attend for free, who then served as extras. By the time of Broken Lives, filmmakers had begun using lesser-known actresses such as Papatya to play singers more famous than the actresses themselves. The film depended on the gap between a performer’s real circumstances and the glamorous or celebrated life represented onscreen; as audiences became familiar with the star, that gap could narrow and support new roles.

The production had to recreate a crowd by offering free kebabs to men wearing ties and women without headscarves. The practical arrangement captures the strained economics behind the spectacle: a film could depict a packed, prosperous entertainment world even when its makers had difficulty attracting extras to a dusty cinema for a free performance. The screen’s apparent abundance was assembled from incentives and artifice, just as the script’s apparent readiness concealed the compromises that had brought it to production.

Reception and a temporary revival

The film’s reception split sharply between critics and audiences. Critics belittled Broken Lives, but viewers in Istanbul and the provinces responded enthusiastically, and it became a box-office hit. Its final songs, performed by Papatya’s character, moved audiences to tears; the climactic revenge against the rich man who had deceived and dishonored the heroine produced widespread satisfaction. The emotional clarity of melodrama succeeded where the production’s literary title and artistic claims could not: audiences came, followed the heroine’s suffering, and left visibly affected.

The response also extended beyond the cinema. The actor who played the villain, Ekrem Güçlü, became so associated with the role that he temporarily stopped going out after being punched and spat upon in the street. The film had made its fictional injustice legible enough for some viewers to direct their anger at the performer who embodied it. Meanwhile, Broken Lives was praised for bringing back people who had avoided cinemas during the terror years, the period preceding the military coup. The return of audiences filled the Pelür Bar with industry workers again, now making deals and seeking visibility as the business showed signs of recovery.

For Kemal, the hit altered his position in the industry. Its commercial success made him a prominent producer at the Pelür Bar, where cameramen and well-known actors sought his company. The shift was consequential but not a resolution of the crisis: one successful film revived attention and confidence, while the account’s broader picture still includes political danger, censorship, insecure financing, and a workforce forced into substitute occupations. Broken Lives demonstrates how popular melodrama could reconnect films with an audience, even as the conditions of its production exposed the fragility and compromises of the industry that made it.