A semiotic analysis of the 'Toz Bezi' film on gender andwomen's solidarity in Turkish cinema

In this study, gender and female representations seen in women-oriented films of women directors who made films in Turkish cinema after 2010 and the effect of solidarity-based relationships between female characters that develop around these representations on the narrative were examined. The aim of the study is to examine the effect of gender on the life and narrative structure of female characters by semiotic method in terms of the subject, theme, characters and the sequence/weave of established events in the films of women directors who made women films that remained in a minority compared to the intensity of male-oriented narratives in the 2010s, as in the history of Turkish cinema. In this direction, the basic concepts and opinions were explained by examining the relationship between women, gender and cinema, and the representation of women in Turkish cinema was examined within the scope of the gender concept. Then, the representations of gender and women's solidarity in the film Toz Bezi (2015), which gave the most obvious examples of women's solidarity in the cinema of women directors in Turkish cinema in the 2010s, were studied by semiotic analysis. As a result of the analysis, in the film Toz Bezi, the traces of widespread gender discrimination in Turkish society are clearly visible in the scenes selected around the established themes of gender and women's solidarity. The fact that female characters receive support from each other in order to survive this discrimination shows that despite the structure in which the male point of view is at the forefront of cinema, a different understanding of cinema is also possible when women have a say in filmmaking.