A Transnational Cinema: Tunç Okan's Migration Trilogy

A Transnational Cinema invites readers to interpret Tunç Okan's "Cinema of Migration" through the lens of migration and aesthetic transitions, focusing on his "Migration Trilogy."

Tunç Okan is a filmmaker who has lived, worked, and made films in five different countries since he began his acting career in 1965. Just like the director himself, Okan's cinema is semi-nomadic, as it constantly 'travels' between different film styles, genres, aesthetics, and approaches since his first film, The Bus. Okan is an eclectic filmmaker.

He adapts, borrows, imitates, and even sometimes copies ideas and approaches from different creators in the world of cinema and literature, from Aziz Nesin to Friedrich Dürrenmatt, from Jacques Tati to Jack Clayton. Like every nomad, Okan travels light, carrying only a few essential elements from one film to another.

His serious-comic vision, which sees good within evil and evil within good, and his multi-layered structure, which provokes divided reception, are some of the most enduring characteristics observed in all of Okan's films. Regardless of the subject he chooses or the genre or film style he employs, Okan's cinema persistently showcases these.

Okan is one of the most important figures in Turkish cinema history, not only because he was one of the first independent Turkish filmmakers, but also because he was one of the first filmmakers to make films with the ambition of reaching an international audience from Turkey. I hope this work will help those who wish to discover and examine Okan's cinema more closely.