Under the Shadow by Kaya Genç

Author:Kaya Genç
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

As Turkey’s leading young horror film maker, Evrenol could not come from a more rationalist and positivist family. He was born into a family of architects, and his mother had a pretty communist mindset. Coming from a right-wing family in Izmir, she had spent her youth hanging out with feminists and socialists and had little appetite for the irrational.

Evrenol’s father studied at Istanbul’s prestigious Robert College, whose alumni include Turkish Nobelist Orhan Pamuk. ‘My father came from this quite Kemalist family’, Evrenol says. ‘His parents were friends with İsmet İnönü, the second president of the republic. My father used to wear long, charismatic coats and grew his hair while in high school. He went to Germany for his college education and got his German discipline from there. His family was also quite strict and my father was totally into discipline when he came back to Turkey.’ Evrenol describes his father’s mindset as a curious mixture of German discipline and American conservatism. (Evrenol also has a brother; born in 1986, his younger brother has worked for Microsoft at Seattle and, according to Evrenol, is a more scientifically minded fellow.)

‘When I was little our parents would not let us watch TV’, Evrenol tells me. ‘It had to be turned off during the day. They would make us listen to classical music and look at Renaissance paintings in books.’ Their upstairs neighbours were their sole gate to the outside world where Prime Minister Turgut Özal was in the process of constructing a new, liberal economy in Turkey. ‘Another neighbour next door would watch soccer games while our television set was firmly turned off. They would listen to arabesque music from their radio while we listened to Turkish jazz musicians like Okay Temiz from our CD player. My parents would say: “Hey, if you don’t want to end up like them, you should study a bit harder!”’

Evrenol grew up in Istanbul’s Çiftehavuzlar neighbourhood, in an apartment with a large garden. ‘I spent my time outdoors, on streets. We really grew up in this mahalle [street] culture. Many friends in our generation grew up indoors but I was constantly on the streets. It was so much fun. When I went indoors the atmosphere of discipline would return.’

Evrenol went to a public school where half of the pupils were kapıcı çocuğu, sons of apartment doorkeepers. He remembers how he saw no social divisions between himself and his friends with whom he played football until late hours.

‘My parents were not snobs but they nevertheless imposed on us a regime of intellectual fascism’, Evrenol remembers. ‘In secondary school they would drive me to tears just because I watched this television programme called Televole about football and gossip.’

Evrenol’s father, who passed away in 2014, was a big fan of sci-fi cinema and an inspiration for his elder son. His tombstone is two metres long and has the shape of a monolith which is a reference to his favourite film, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. ‘My father was an incredibly interesting and open-minded fellow’, Evrenol says.

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