Film takes Ataturk off his pedestal

By Delphine Strauss and Funja Guler in Ankara

Published: November 11 2008 01:02 | Last updated: November 11 2008 01:02

At 9.05am on Monday sirens sounded across Turkey, traffic halted and flags were lowered to half mast to mark the death, 70 years earlier, of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk – venerated as founder of the modern republic.

Thousands of students and office workers queued through the afternoon to pay their respects and lay flowers at Anitkabir, Ataturk’s mausoleum in Ankara, to a backdrop of military music and booming recordings of his speeches.

But even among the stiff annual rituals and omnipresent official portraits, a new film has this month sparked controversy by portraying the national hero as a hard-drinking, hard-smoking womaniser plagued with doubts and all-too human weakness. The documentary, blending original footage and photographs with re-enactments, carries the leader’s childhood name, Mustafa, rather than the honorific “Ataturk” (meaning “father of the Turks”) later bestowed on him. It highlights Ataturk’s political successes, but also portrays him as a lonely, ambitious boy, a failed family man, a leader frustrated at Turkey’s slow modernisation, and an old man fretting about his legacy.

The facts around which the film is woven are largely known and undisputed. But the presentation has outraged hardline Kemalists, with the most extreme critics dubbing it part of an international conspiracy to discredit Turkey.

Can Dundar, its director, has also been confronted with more specific complaints – ranging from the use of a Greek actor to play Ataturk as a child to the inclusion of a photograph thought to make the leader look too short. Other critics have dubbed the documentary a well-calculated commercial ploy, albeit one that now appears to have backfired.

Teachers, worried about deviating from the official history, have been cancelling school cinema trips.

Mustafa has scared off a corporate sponsor, the mobile phone operator Turkcell, which was apparently worried about annoying subscribers. “This film is not portraying Ataturk as a hero, as a saviour of this country. That’s what we wanted,” a spokesman for Turkcell said, when asked to explain the company’s decision to withdraw its sponsorship.

Supporters say the film is a breath of fresh air in comparison to the stilted, two-dimensional version of Ataturk’s life kept fossilised in the official school curriculum. Mehmet Ali Birand, a prominent journalist, argues critics of the film wanted “an elegy to Ataturk” rather than the more realistic portrait they are getting. “I loved the Mustafa that Can [Dundar] presented to us, with his weaknesses, with his love affairs ... with his fear of the darkness. I loved him better than his statues.”

Mr Dundar – whose previous work has been impeccably secularist in outlook – says the controversy shows that people are hungry for debate on Ataturk’s legacy.

“It’s like being in a minefield,” he says. “I walked in and set off an explosion. But I think it’s going to be positive ... because this film is out of the official line.”

At the core of the debate lie fears that Ataturk’s legacy – enshrined in a constitution based on rigid principles of nationalism, secularism and a centralised state – is under threat from a religious-minded governing party and growing middle class.

Many visiting Anitkabir on Monday came to support old-style Kemalism, in protest at the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) they suspect of plotting to bring religion into public life.

Carrying one corner of a huge Ataturk portrait was Serdah Hos, member of an anti-government non-governmental organisation called Biz Kac Kisiyiz (How Many Are We). He was dubious about the film, saying, “It makes him look like a dictator and it’s not true.”

A woman in her 50s declared: “We want to show that we are defending Ataturk’s principles. I haven’t seen the film yet and I don’t want to after the criticism I’ve read.”

But reflecting the contradictions in Turkish society, some more devout visitors approached the mausoleum openly praying for the leader who, himself atheist, laid the foundations of the secular republic.

One student keen to see the film was Burak, who said he was there “to show that we’re following Ataturk’s ways”. He was visiting the mausoleum in a group of 1,000 yellow-shirted supporters of Fenerbahce football club – another Turkish institution that inspires fanatical devotion.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008