The shaman's journey in Derviş Zaim's cinema

Derviş Zaim is one of the representatives of art cinema, commonly known as "Independent Cinema", which emerged as an alternative to mainstream Turkish cinema in the 1990s. Derviş Zaim's cinema, while bearing the general characteristics of "Independent Cinema", differs from its contemporaries with its awareness of nourishment from cultural codes and traditional narrative forms in both formal and content terms, with its search for an original cinema aesthetics. It can be said that the director, who explains this orientation with the concepts of authentic representation and confrontation, is in pursuit of a healing ideal in both ethical and aesthetic terms. Therefore, the diseases that appear as a common theme in Derviş Zaim's filmography, depending on the cultural, social, political and ecological problems he addresses, are healed with an initiation to be reached by confronting the truth at the end of a mythical journey and with a treatment ritual. Our findings regarding the quest process of the heroes in his films and the mythical motifs supporting this process being related to the ancient Turkish religion and the shaman's journey constitute the reason for conducting a mythological content analysis of Derviş Zaim's fictional films in this thesis.