The Price of Sex (Chakarova, 2011)

JACK BRINDELLI

The opening of The Price of Sex hits you hard like a punch to the gut.

“What were the first words [of English you learned]?”

“How much? With or without [condoms]?”

If that weren’t enough, the statistic that 1.5million women are trapped in this living hell follows. That’s an estimate - the actual figure is almost certainly higher. The order of these exposures makes an important statement too. We’re presented with human tragedy before we hear the figures; so from the start we’re invited to see statistics as millions of individual horror stories, rather than simply cold impersonal calculations. Before, the tales behind the numbers largely went unheard. Mimi Chakarova’s film changes that.

Originally from Bulgaria (a major source of human trafficking) it’s perhaps easy to see why she was so willing to go beyond the call of duty for this project. She goes undercover on various occasions as a sex-worker - at great personal risk – to tell the human stories behind the statistics. Whilst Chakarova herself migrated to the USA to become a photojournalist after the fall of the USSR, she often wonders what might have happened if she stayed.

With prospects scarce in Bulgaria, Moldova (Europe’s most trafficked country) etc, young people have two choices, “become criminals or go abroad and risk being trafficked”. Bulgaria itself once had the highest percentage of women employed anywhere in the world. When the USSR crumbled however, many were forced to leave to earn money abroad, and it became easy for traffickers to lure women into the sex-trade with false promises of employment.

These economic disparities and institutional failures are recurring themes at this film’s core. Ana Revenco of La Strada, a call-centre that helps ‘one woman at a time’ – is keen to point out the futility of their struggle without wider changes. She says the key issue is an economic one: citizens of poor countries cannot afford the same access to justice we take for granted in wealthier nations. Unless this changes, Revenco asserts “all these hotlines will not solve the situation.”

Personally I find this uncompromising stance on the failure to tackle the economic inequality as admirable as Chakarova’s risky undercover work. Where many film-makers (perhaps with awards on their mind) might baulk at naming the free market as the cause of the poverty that empowers traffickers, she pulls no punches by showing the principles of supply and demand are as much culprits here as pimps themselves.

This gives her chosen conclusion; an interviewee saying, “Ask the next question” an added importance. When asked later why she chose this ending, Chakarova stated she intended to provoke a response from the audience, to stir them into action. In a time of deepening economic crisis, as millions world-wide descend into poverty, that action must extend beyond simple acts of charity, toward radical economic change – or traffickers will continue to prey on the desperation of Europe’s poor to line their pockets. In other words, the ‘next question’ is: What Is To Be Done? 

On Women and Turkish Cinema

EYLEM ATAKAV 

@eylematakav

Earlier in November my book Women and Turkish Cinema was published by Routledge. Here, I would like to share some thoughts on the volume for those who may have an interest on the topic. Every book is and offers a journey, and so, here is a part of mine... 

Following a decade of increased and violent polarisation between Left and Right in Turkish politics, the army decided to intervene to put an end to what appeared to be incipient civil war. The military intervention of September 12^th 1980 aimed towards a period of depoliticisation in society as it crushed all political parties and particularly leftist organisations, while temporarily suspending democracy and thereby bringing normal political life to a complete halt. I, Atıl Eylem, was born a year after the coup. My name is an extremely politically resonant name which literally means ‘go for action’ and has an overt link with the leftist political activism that both my parents were involved in. As I explain in detail in the Introduction of the book:

“The story behind my name does not only refer to the name of one of the left wing journals (Atılım) which had to be published clandestinely, but also assigns me the role and pride of carrying the keywords of the left wing activists who fought, and at times were either killed or went through serious physical and mental torture, for their ideas. I was born a year after my father lost his comrade (arkadaş) who was shot while being carried wounded in his arms (still trying to voice his ideas); and after my mother and father had cried for their books which died in the cold damp cellar of a friend’s house, while being hidden from the police, who were inspecting every house to find censored books. Whoever had a copy of Das Kapital, was to be stamped as leftist, and hence needed to be under strict scrutiny by the police. These books full of ‘dangerous’ ideas should be burnt. Those who had managed to read them did so by covering them with gazette papers or hiding them behind the covers of other non-dangerous books. I was born on a day when no newspapers were published, because it was a religious holiday.”

This personal background informs my initial interest in analysing this decade’s political, social and cultural environment from a critical perspective. In the repressive and depoliticised atmosphere of the post-coup period, the first social movement that emerged and articulated its demands was the women’s movement. It expanded the scope of pluralism and democracy in Turkey through different concerns communicated by women in the public realm. Although feminist ideology is overtly political, in this period of depoliticisation the movement was only able to exist because its activists sought to free themselves from both the Right and the Left and any other clearly partisan political label and they did not found any institutions seeking to increase women’s political representation. Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 women had been given rights by the state through what is often termed state feminism. In the 1980s women were, for the first time, raising their own independent voices through campaigns, festivals, demonstrations, publications of journals and the forming of consciousness-raising groups.

Profoundly affected by the social and political milieu, Turkish cinema went through a period of change in the 1980s. Overtly political or social realist films were censored, banned or destroyed as a result of the forcible depoliticisation in the aftermath of the coup. Women’s lives and issues (perceived as neither Left wing nor Right wing and hence apolitical) became prominent in Turkish cinema and this led to the production of an extensive body of women’s films.

This brings me to the central proposition of this book, that is: the enforced depoliticisation introduced after the coup is responsible for uniting feminism and film in 1980s Turkey. The feminist movement was able to flourish precisely because it was not perceived as political or politically significant. In a parallel move in the films of the 1980s there was an increased tendency to focus on the individual, on women’s issues and lives, in order to avoid the overtly political.

The key questions that frame my analysis here are: What is the link between the women’s movement and representation of women in Turkish cinema in the 1980s? Were cinema and the women’s movement both affected in the same way in the post-coup political milieu? Were films affected by the movement or were they simply marginalising political issues by focusing on women’s lives?

In the book, I also focus on contemporary women filmmakers in Turkey who tend to concentrate on a range of issues around political, cultural and ethnic identity as well as memory. It is also in this section that I offer a further study into the representation of women of Turkey in several documentaries made by women directors who live outside Turkey, which has the relationship between religion and women’s place in Turkey in the centre of their narratives. Olga Nakkas’ 2006 film Women of Turkey: Between Islam and Secularism, for instance, draws on interviews with women and examines the individual and political resonance of the headscarf and veiling. Binnur Karaevli’s 2009 film Voices Unveiled: Turkish Women Who Dare provides a critique of the ban on wearing headscarves at the same time as touching upon issues including female officers in mosques; violence in the name of Islam; lack of education and economic dependence of women; women and Turkey’s EU candidacy and the tensions inherent between Muslim and Western cultures.