Glaring and out loud! Thinking women’s cinema in Turkey through agency and companionship

Abstract

Recognizing the 2010s as a decade that marks a shift in the audiovisual landscape in Turkey in terms of increased visibility of women and diversity of gender roles on screen, but most importantly as a decade of women filmmakers’ rising voices, in this article, we aim to bring forward the significant strands and tendencies that define this period via a discussion of the representations of women marking a break and a difference from the past examples, and an evaluation of women filmmakers’ ever growing involvement in the film industry and their solidarity networks. The data in this article was gathered within the work packages of a 26-month research project and it includes the insights, analyses and results drawn from quantitative and qualitative methods. In the following pages, we aim to reveal the diversified output of women filmmakers of the 2010s and to establish the extended boundaries of their filmmaking without setting hierarchies between mainstream, art-house, short, animation or documentary films. Marking this period as unique and ample in the history of cinema in Turkey, we aim to emphasize its novelties. We then turn to the statistical results of our research project and cross-read them with our interview data with an affirmative ethical approach. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.