Sözde Kizlar

In the shadow of the Greek occupation of Western Anatolia, Muhsin Ertuğrul’s ‘Sözde Kızlar’ (1924) manifests as a somber, cinematic interrogation of national trauma and moral erosion. The narrative follows Mebure, a woman whose existence is fractured by the displacement of war, as she traverses the distance between the burning hearths of Anatolia and the deceptive tranquility of Istanbul. Upon her arrival in the metropolis, she is subsumed into the household of her affluent relatives—a milieu defined by an unsettling detachment from the burgeoning struggle for independence. Here, the film pivots into a psychosexual drama as Behiç, the hedonistic scion of the family, identifies Mebure’s vulnerability not as a cause for empathy, but as an opportunity for exploitation. While the salons of Istanbul whisper with the echoes of a dying empire, Mebure embarks on a desperate, peripatetic quest to locate her missing father, an odyssey that serves as a poignant metaphor for a daughter—and a nation—searching for its lost patriarchal foundation amidst the ruins of the old world.