Turkish Board of Censors

The Turkish Board of Censors is presented as a powerful state institution whose judgments reached beyond the screening room: it could determine whether a film was made in an acceptable form, cut for release, or barred altogether. Its rules and unpredictable decisions shaped scripts, production choices, financing risks, and the prospects of Turkish filmmakers, while the industry developed a parallel system of agents and rewrites to navigate its demands.

Authority and Scope

For years, Kemal Basmacı knew the Board chiefly through occasional newspaper stories about prominent foreign films. Lawrence of Arabia had been banned for insulting Turkishness, while Last Tango in Paris had been cut, with its sexual scenes removed. Once he became involved in Lemon Films, he encountered censorship not as distant news but as a practical force governing the business of making films.

The restrictions described by Hayal Hayati extended across sexual content and a broad range of politically or socially sensitive subjects. Films were expected to avoid lewdness and sex scenes, as well as interpretations of Islam, Atatürk, the Turkish army, the president, religious figures, Kurds, Armenians, Jews, or Greeks that the authorities or censors might reject. The breadth of the list made approval a constraint on subject matter, not simply a final technical check before theatrical release.

Hayal Hayati also described a less predictable form of authority. Over decades, Board members had not only enforced state preferences but developed personal agendas, excluding material that happened to offend or annoy them. In Kemal’s account, that discretion was a source of power in itself: the standard could shift with the decision-maker, leaving filmmakers unable to rely on a consistent boundary between permissible and forbidden work.

Discretion, Bans, and Personal Reversals

Hayal Hayati recounted several bans that illustrated the Board’s reach into ordinary stories. A film about an inept security guard was prohibited on the grounds that it demeaned security guards; a story about a wife and mother who fell in love with another man was judged insulting to motherhood; and a comedy about a truant child was rejected for supposedly alienating children from school. The examples made even commonplace plots vulnerable to expansive interpretations of social harm.

The Board’s power became personal when Hayal Hayati’s own first film after leaving it was banned. The work had been costly, and its quarrels at a family dinner table had been drawn, he said, from everyday life. Yet a scene in which a man became angry because the salad had no vinegar, alongside two other family disputes, was deemed a threat to the family as society’s foundation. The episode revealed the distance between a filmmaker’s intentions and the Board’s reading of a scene, and Hayal Hayati’s anger centered especially on the former colleagues who had rejected his film.

He obtained a second consideration, but release required extensive changes. He removed the family quarrels that the Board considered demeaning, retaining only a scene in which a violent son attacked his younger sister at the urging of their devout mother. After those edits, the film passed. The exception sharpened the apparent inconsistency: conflict within the family could be cut as socially damaging, while a different and more severe conflict remained acceptable within the revised film.

Approval Procedures and Intermediaries

Hayal Hayati regarded cuts as preferable to an outright ban. A film altered to satisfy the Board might still reach cinemas and earn back its investment if audiences could follow it; a total prohibition threatened the entire production. In response to that risk, the censorship process was divided into two stages. In the first, producers submitted the screenplay for approval of its subject and scenes, before the work proceeded toward release.

Seeking state permission had generated a complicated business of applications, permits, and bribery, with agents and agencies offering to guide filmmakers through it. In spring 1977, Kemal and Feridun considered which agent to use for Blue Rain. The choice mattered not only as an administrative detail: in a market where few popular screenplays gained approval, a script’s prospects could determine whether a company could undertake a film at all.

One intermediary was Demir the Typewriter, a former boxer and a skilled screenplay reviser. He recast scripts on his Remington, smoothing distinctions between rich and poor, workers and bosses, victims and wrongdoers, and adding reassuring references to the flag, the nation, Atatürk, and Allah when a film’s ending might otherwise trouble the censors. His work translated censorship into changes of tone and structure, making sharp divisions gentler and severe moments more compatible with the appearance of everyday innocence. Even established companies entrusted him with screenplays, sometimes seeking his distinctive lightness rather than merely the removal of objectionable content.

Kemal, Feridun, and Füsun visited Demir at his home in Kurtuluş and saw the old typewriter associated with his reputation. His workload delayed their screenplay; several months later, one of Demir’s daughters returned a version revised for Füsun. She was frustrated by the wait, while Kemal reminded her that Feridun’s own work had also been slow. The episode shows how censorship could extend into the pace and personal circumstances of production, even when no final ban had yet occurred.

Effects on Film Production and Audiences

The need for approved screenplays altered the choices available to directors and producers. Feridun explained that a screenplay described as ready had either passed the Board or received state permissions that promised a safe route to filming. Because so few popular scripts cleared the process, filmmakers dependent on producing one or two films a year might accept a ready screenplay they had not previously considered. Years of cutting away material judged prickly or original had, in Kemal’s view, made films increasingly uniform; the availability of permission could become more decisive than a director’s interest in the material.

Broken Lives illustrates the commercial and creative consequences of this environment. Feridun began shooting the ready screenplay in May 1981. Though it borrowed its title from Halit Ziya’s novel, the film’s story belonged to the streets and music venues of 1970s Istanbul rather than the novel’s world. Its heroine, played by Papatya, pursued revenge and fame as a singer after a wealthy man had violated her honor. The evidence identifies the screenplay as ready, but the Board’s influence is visible more broadly in the production context: the value of an approved project, the pressure to make films that could be distributed, and the later effort to shape a sequel’s story for censorship approval.

The film’s success also demonstrates that regulation did not eliminate audience demand. Critics attacked Broken Lives, but audiences in Istanbul and the provinces embraced it; its final songs moved viewers, and the heroine’s revenge brought a strong response. The hit helped draw people back to cinemas after the years of political violence preceding the military coup, and the renewed business revived activity at the Pelür Bar. Its success raised Kemal’s standing as a producer and led to plans for a sequel and a record for Papatya.

The sequel’s proposed opening, in which Papatya’s character would be revealed as alive after feigning death, emerged from the pressure to continue a successful film while securing approval for what came next. Papatya later said she had invented a story about her private life to help the sequel pass the censors. Separately, a song from her record was barred from television and radio by the censorship board attached to Turkey’s only television channel, called the Inspectorate of Music. That was a distinct authority from the Turkish Board of Censors, but it shows that the regulation of cultural visibility extended beyond cinema.

Institutional Significance

The Board’s significance lies in the way formal state oversight combined with personal discretion and commercial risk. A producer faced not only the possibility that a finished film would be cut or banned, but also an earlier decision over whether its screenplay and subject could proceed. The resulting system rewarded scripts that could be made acceptable, encouraged reliance on intermediaries such as Demir the Typewriter, and made a label like ready valuable to filmmakers whose businesses depended on regular production.

At the same time, the Board did not wholly dictate what audiences would embrace. Censorship could narrow the material available to filmmakers and redirect how a screenplay was written, yet films such as Broken Lives could still become popular and revive public interest in cinemas. In the narrative, censorship is therefore both a regulatory institution and a force inside the film industry’s daily economy: it governs access to production and release, while filmmakers, intermediaries, and producers continually adapt to its formal rules and uncertain judgments.