…he produces one of the most humane portrayals of Atatürk.
The film Mustafa demonstrates once again that Kemalist clergy (intellectuals, opinion leaders, cultural producers), cannot accept Mustafa Kemal as a human being. It is a suprahuman heroic entity. He has prophetic qualities. Any other portrayal is blasphemy. Can Dündar is a well-intentioned Kemalist but he could not escape being accused by these people and their militant disciples. I have watched the movie/documentary with a girl who started blurbing against the director before the movie and continued afterwards. This good work of biography has no meaning for her and others.
I would recommend the movie. It is too personal, it might ignore some of the social aspects of the early Republican years but it certainly gives clues to understand. Oh boy, those men and women around him in his later years are so familiar. He was surrounded by sycophants. He lost his closest friends and allies in political trials and he ended up surrounded with these people who would be the base of later cult of Kemalism. The cult was the reason of their existence and so they fed them. This still continues today.
Mustafa Kemal is a heavy smoker and drinker. He cannot sleep at nights, lonely and he cannot seem to have long term relations. So what? I would not lose my respect because of these but today’s Kemalist clergy is socially conservative as much as Islamists are. So this portrayal hurts them….
