Remake, Remix, Rip-Off: About Copy Culture & Turkish Pop Cinema

This German made documentary is about the classic Yesilcham cinema in Turkey whose heyday was from 1960 - 1990. Yesilcham started out with a limited budget with rudimentary technical equipment to compete with Hollywood cinema where only the Westernized elites could afford a ticket and to have a national cinema to call its own.

Despite the crude productions, crass effects and copying of Hollywood films as central in this documentary, Yesilcham did produce some good, organic films in its own right in collaboration with musical artists such as Orhan Genchebay and talented actors Tarik Akan, Kemal Sunal, Hale Soygazi, Filiz Akin and many others but this does not get enough attention in this documentary - for a budgeted film industry that is quite an achievement.

However with hindsight they could off been better thought out and written with common sense, non pretentious with copyright laws and good basic training similar to Greek Cinema despite this the films will always be classics and stand the test of time.

The demise of Yesilcham started slowly in the 1980s and by the dawn of the 1990s due to the privatisation of television and with this the focus to making television series not films Yesilcham extinguished and the actors had to find new careers, however it marks a great era in cinema.