Turkey to U.S.: Drop Your Orientalist Lens

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/america/2007/11/turkey_america_film_orientalism.html

Turkey to U.S.: Drop Your Orientalist Lens

ISTANBUL - Lounging on a yacht in Istanbul’s Atakoy marina, four young Turkish filmmakers say America must see Turkey through their eyes, not through the hackneyed lens of old movies like Midnight Express, about an American imprisoned in an obscene Turkish jail, or the thirty-second news bytes of television news.

Western audiences are still trapped in an “orientalist view of Turkey,” they say, replete with seedy bureaucrats, "dirty carpet vendors," and lonely allies. Americans imagine Turkey to be a land torn apart by a “clash of civilizations between East and West.” That’s what sells abroad, they say, but it doesn’t represent the “true Turkey,” the Turkey they want their films to show.

Hollywood movies, Turkish films directed at Western audiences, and the American students they meet here in Istanbul convince these four just how pervasive the negative images are.

Filmmakers Hakan Bural, Forhat Sen and Cenk Erturk are all facilitators of Bosphorus University’s exchange program, which welcomes foreign students arriving in Turkey for their first time. One of the students they welcomed was a Washingtonian Turkish-American named Denis Metin, whose father owns this yacht. Denis goes to George Washington University in DC and is studying abroad in Istanbul for the year.

Kicking for more attention. Comments are also quite interesting!

.... is Edward Said's "Orientalism" (which described the origins of some of those stereotypes, and who benefits from perpetuating them).

Or that "Said" has two syllables?

Ed Said went to elementary school with Omar Sahrif, by the way, who is also a Xian Arab, and not named Omar Sharif, but is bankrupt from bad bridge debts.