In Germany, the examples of “cinema of duty” include works by German filmmakers-such as Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf/Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Sander-Brahms’ Shirins Hochzeit/Shirin’s Wedding (1976), Bohm’s Yasemin (1988)-as well as works by German-Turkish directors, such as Başer’s 40 m 2 Deutschland/Forty Square Meters of Germany (1986) and Abschied vom falschen / Farewell to a False Paradise (1989) (Berghahn 2009 Burns 2007). While aiming to raise political consciousness, these films usually reproduced cultural stereotypes, maintained binary oppositions and constructed marginal subjectivity mainly as one of victimhood. In the particular context of European cinema, “cinema of duty” corresponds to a subgenre in the 1970s and 1980s which concerned itself with exposing the plight of the immigrant/ethnic other. This is a term originally used by the film critic Cameron Bailey to refer to those films which are “social issue in content, documentary-realist in style, firmly responsible in intention” and which “position subjects in direct relation to social crisis and attempt to articulate ‘problems’ and ‘solutions to problems’ within a framework of center and margin, white and non-white communities” (Bailey qtd.
In these narratives, the period between AKP’s coming to power in 2002 and the early 2010s is represented as the golden age of the party-a period that these new parties claim can be recovered through their reform agendas-where global respect for the country was at its highest and standards in every area (economics, democracy, culture, etc.) had increased. One of the dominant narratives that these figures rely on as they explain to potential voters the reasons behind their dissent to Erdoğan involves the latter’s increasing digression from the foundational principles of AKP, such as the rule of law, pluralist democracy, transparency and accountability, commitment to human rights and freedoms, etc. This is especially the case for those who, in the last few years, split off from Erdoğan’s party AKP to form new political parties, such as former prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s “Gelecek Partisi” (The Future Party) and former minister of foreign affairs, former chief negotiator for EU accession and former economy minister Ali Babacan’s “DEVA Partisi” (Democracy and Progress Party).
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