Youth in independent Turkish cinema after 2000

The main purpose of this study is to reveal the relationship between the representations of youth and the dominant structures in the films Distant (Ceylan, 2002), The Wild Pear Tree (Ceylan, 2018), Bornova Bornova (Temelkuran, 2009), Yellow Heat (Reyhan, 2017), My Father's Wings (Sezer, 2016), Black Dogs Barking (Er & Er Gorbach, 2009), Until I Lose My Breath (Balcı, 2015), A Tale of Three Sisters (Alper, 2019), Majority (Yüce, 2010), My Suburban Stories (Korkut, 2017), Çekmeköy Underground (Türkmen, 2015) and Ghosts (Okyay, 2020) in the Independent Turkish Cinema after 2000. In this study, which is based on the assumption that cinema aestheticizes social reality and reproduces it with its own tools, it is aimed to examine the representations of youth as a social category in Independent Turkish Cinema after 2000 within the framework of the structure-agency relationship. It is known that neoliberal policies, which have led to the change of many dimensions of life on a global scale since the 1980s, have also been adopted in Turkey. As this economy-based transformation process is articulated to other dimensions of society, a new category of youth has been built. Based on the premise that youth is formed by social transformation processes, in this study, how youth agency develops in transition to adulthood against the fields surrounding youngsters' lives is reflected in the twelve films mentioned above has been investigated using the Sociological Criticism method. In this context, starting from the focus on the struggles of young characters in the economic field in the twelve films that are the subject of analysis, it has been concluded that economic conditions have a determining effect on the transition processes of youth representations to adulthood. The young characters in the related movies are in an effort to develop various practices in order to get out of the poverty created by the economic field. In the world of meaning created by the related films, it has been found that the economic field creates obstacles difficult to overcome, especially for poor young people who are uneducated and who lack economic, cultural or social capital. In order to get out of poverty, it has been revealed that young characters sometimes turn to practices that are compatible with the dominant structure, sometimes try to break the rules of the structure, and sometimes develop an escape from the mechanism of the structure. Based on the relationship between the youth representations in the analyzed films and the structure, it has been concluded that there is a parallelism between the debates produced by the sociology of youth in recent years and the meanings produced by the Independent Turkish Cinema after 2000 about youth, and for this reason, the related cinema has social realistic features.