Ottoman History Podcast - Film Diplomacy in Turkey-US Relations

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

with Ayşehan Jülide Etem hosted by Chris Gratien and Sıla Önder | During the Cold War period, Turkish cinema flourished, as American films entered local theaters, television sets, and the studios of Yeşilçam. Yet as Jülide Etem argues in her new book, Film Diplomacy, the cinematic story of Turkey-US relations begins not with entertaining Hollywood movies that circled the globe but rather educational film productions that simultaneously furthered the interests of American overseas power and Turkish domestic policy. In this episode, we explore how film became a ubiquitous technology and tool of the nation-state in Turkey through informational movies, educational material designed for the classroom, and place-based documentaries that performed the dual role of promoting tourism and cultivating knowledge of the country's different provinces among its citizens. As Etem explains, these ambivalent co-productions shaped an image of Turkey's inclusion in the international order, making film an arena in which visions of Turkey could be used to reify notions of American supremacy, as the Turkish national elite claimed their own place among the white Euro-American civilizations that became as models for values like development and progress in the modern world.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. I'm Saléan Daj. And we are joined today by another one of my University of Virginia colleagues. Aishahan, Jolideh Etem. Professor Etem, welcome to the podcast. It is wonderful to be here with you. Thank you for hosting me.

Joliday, you're one of the most exciting scholars here at UVA because your work straddles media studies in a very theoretical and rich way. But you're also doing like really interesting, empirical, research on the history of the topic of your new book, Film Diplomacy. It is what it sounds like, blending the history of film and diplomacy to tell a media history of Turkey-U.S. relations. And I think this book has a lot to offer the Ottoman History podcast audience for all sorts of reasons. I want to start by asking you about the cover. What's this image on the cover of the book? I do like the photograph.

So this photograph shows us a landscape of Turkey from 19. We see four filmmakers. One of them is filming. The other one is likely recording sound. And we're looking at the filmmakers and the production team as they are filming. And they're high above. They're on the hills. And they're looking down to the city. In the very back we see mountains. but in the front part of it we see some buildings, we see a minare, there's a mosque there. And why would a group of filmmakers be up on a hill outside of a very small Turkish city filming? They are likely making a film about this particular city. Today, Tokat den when Ovalar under yetichenged different bitkiller and in the yowlerlander in gyr-oromaloromalry,

in this period there were a strong of the world's englanded in this period there were Turkish filmmakers sponsored by government entities to make films about various cities

and inform the larger publics within Turkey about what was special in these cities that. This reason, to Hittites'er to Hittes to a history So they would have you have a different of the

other of the genuinenessing from to beaughamem to show they would give you information about

the geography, the agricultural produce and the food sugar, shrap, glass,

and taut, t'uble and and other and they would circulate these films across the country

the country to inform people living in other parts of the country about the customs, about the traditions of particular cities. So you have this effort in Turkey over the course of the 20th century to use film as a medium to educate the fellow citizens of Turkey about each other. on this really local level, right? And as you chart in the book, this local story is actually a very global story that has its origins in this process

that you describe as film diplomacy. Now, our listeners, when they hear the term film diplomacy, they probably think, oh, that's propaganda. So when the U.S. conducts diplomacy through film, they're sending propaganda messages, but your approach to the subject in the book is totally different. And it's not just about the content of films, right? The ideological message in the films, but actually what the process of producing, disseminating, screening, and

workshopping film looks like in Turkey. So tell us, in a few words, what film diplomacy is. So it's a process where different entities, governments, organizations, even individuals, they identify a problem and they develop a film-based solution and they test that with their target audiences. And they bring that feedback into the system to improve communication strategies. So that's what I call film diplomacy. So it's not just as simple as state-to-state communication strategy. It's not as simple as an organization to a particular public. It has multiple dimensions.

In other words, we see here U.S. talking to Turkey, Turkey talking back to U.S. We see Protestant missionaries targeting particular audiences in Turkey. We see Turkish government targets. audiences within Turkey, but also within other transnational cases. So I'm looking at this from a wider perspective. I'm looking at relationships that nations build and try to build with their target audiences. So it's not just about the filmmakers or the governments. It's about everybody involved.

the audiences are a crucial part of it too. How does your conceptualization of film diplomacy change how we view diplomacy in general? So film diplomacy is a form of public diplomacy. And what's really helpful to understand here is I conceptualize it through three layers. And when I do that, I'm thinking about the major actors within this network. the Protestant missionaries, United States Information Services, and the Turkish elites, the Ministry of National Education and the wider system there. So when you focus on the dynamics within the missionary networks, what I see there is everything was ad hoc. They were using film, but it wasn't

necessarily structured. They had to change their strategy. as they faced obstacles. So that's like one layer. The next one is what the United States Information Services did. They are much more organized around how they want to use film. They really use film strategically. They have a mission, they identify problems, and they use film to address that problem. And they use audience reception surveys to test the solution with their target audiences. So it's a very clear system. And then it gets even more complex that the third layer where we see these actors working together. There is a collaboration component. They are not just coming and entering the national spectrum. They are working with

ministries. They are working with local teachers. They are working with amateur filmmakers. They are working with the audiences, with the people. And Turkish audiences, Turkish elites, are open to it. The layering of the system is really important to think about what I mean by film diplomacy and how it's actually is a method to study other transnational. national context. So based on the archival materials that I found, it has happened in the context of U.S.-Iran relations. It has happened in the context of U.S.-China relations. And I'm working on a project where I'm looking at these types of relationships in India, Kenya, Philippines, Mexico. There's so much more that can be done with these archival materials and the concept of film diplomacy.

It becomes this useful tool just like the film itself. And you call this public diplomacy or a form of public diplomacy where Turkey and the United States are interacting with one another, but the audiences for film, their citizens are part of this diplomatic process in a way that's very different from our conception, probably false conception of like old 19th century diplomacy of smoking cigars and making deals. This is a much more iterative process. Before we delve deeper in that story, I was wondering if you could share with us a little clip of one of the many films you look at in the book.

As we said, the book isn't just about the content of these films, but they really are incredible historical artifacts. I found these films, like 24 of them, in Indiana, in an archive, and I watched them all, and I was surprised that they existed. They were showing Turkey from 1960s, 1950s, 80s. They all used voiceover, and the voiceover is always in English. Across the Atlantic Ocean, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, is my country. Republic of Turkey. Turkey is a bridge land between Europe and Asia. This film, the voiceover, it belongs to this Turkish man, boy called Ahmed.

And he's describing us Turkey. About 27 million people live in Turkey. He's telling us we have many neighborhoods. Geographical, the semi-arid plateaus of central Turkey are very much like the high plains of Texas. The agricultural, we also grow watermelons, industrial, which we call George Washington watermelons. On our farm we grow many things, including, that's right, turkeys. And he's talking about resources. Turkey is one of the world's largest producers of chromite. Which is very interesting. This is the new airport at Ankara. And then he presents us to his friend Mike. There he is. And we learned that Ahmed visits

visited Mike last year. I hope Mike will enjoy his visit to my country as much as I did to his. And they travel around the country. My uncle puts us on the bus, which will take us to my father's farm. They use various forms of transportation. And after our bus and train trips, it will be fun traveling by sea. And it's interesting, one of the first modes of transportation methods he mentioned is camels. Istanbul is a link between the eastern and western parts of old world history.

Quite striking for me growing up in Turkey. At our house, Mike is greeted by my grandfather, my mother, and sisters. I think Mike is a little surprised to see them dressed in Western clothes. But the content that these films give, it resembles some of the things that I learned in middle school, in elementary school. I think you can probably relate to this a lot. You know, we learn Turkey from this very particular perspective. You know, we are a strong nation. We produce a lot of agricultural goods.

We are modern. Absolutely, yeah. And what is also striking about this particular film is the credits. Remember the initial credits? There were university consultants, like professors of geography. To me, when I see that, I always question who is behind the scenes. That's something that I do in this book. You wonder who scripted this film.

This is definitely scripted. This is not a simple story of a young Turkish boy who speaks very clear English, very fluently. Is this a voice actor talking as if they were. Turkish. And, you know, it's scripted. But Ahmed and Mike are friends, right? Don't tell us that that's not really either, right? They are best friends.

You know, you learn that at the end. You see that throughout the film. Most of us in Turkey are Muslims and we worship at mosques. The time has come for Mike to leave. At the airport where we say goodbye, I give Mike a book of photographs all about Turkey. to take home with him. He gives me his most prized possession, his camera. Mike and I have become the best of friends, and I know that our countries will also always be friends.

Since Ota-Turk, Turkey has become a modern, progressive country. With good friends such as America, we will continue our progress. Goodbye, Mike. Come back and visit us again, soon. And the product is, of course, incredibly simple and clear, right? There's clear expectation of what the audience will be able to digest in this. But the process that went into it, as you say, is incredibly complicated and is, as we learn in your book, a decades-long process that stretches back to the beginning of Turkey's history as a republic.

So when the Turkish Republic is founded, there's this whole-scale modernization project. And it's not just political or legal reform, but it's reform in the sense that the whole society and the culture of Turkey is being transformed under the new Kemalist regime. For example, wearing a fez is no longer allowed, but you're supposed to wear these European-style hats. There is reform in education.

There's reform in language. There's a shift from the Arabic script to the Latin script. It's just this whole-scale social and cultural transformation going on. in Turkey. It's this big modernization project. And there are certain markers of being modern that are being equated with being Turkish. So being Turkish means being modern. Having a certain type of nuclear family, speaking in a certain way, doing activities in a certain way, going to the opera, going to the theater. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about film. How does it fit in within this broader history of this modernization project of the newly

found a Turkish Republic. Okay, so let's think about film as this technological tool, right? What does film represent? Film is a tool of modernization. It's a product of science. It's something technical. I think the best way to answer that is like maybe we need to go and think about 1930s. The film culture is vibrant but not necessarily used extensively to reach publics and influence their behavior and opinion at that time. There's actually this excellent report by a U.S. embassy worker who conducted research across Turkey. He counted the number of movie theaters, he conducted interviews with young audiences and prepared a report about Turkish film culture and presented it to the State Department.

And one of the interesting findings is that he thought that the Turkish government was not using film enough or at all for propaganda purposes. So he identified that gap and was basically suggesting that, There is something that we can do here. There are no clear regulations. There are no clear rules. And there is a lot of potential. There is clear interest.

And it's interesting because there were, you know, films produced in Turkey and even in the late Ottoman Empire, like as a medium. This medium did exist. But actually, you're talking about a moment in Turkey's history where increasingly diverse audiences are consuming film, largely as an imported product. And paradoxically, you have this American diplomat saying that Turkey needs to develop its own local film industry, right?

And one thing that he says in the report is a reference to this Protestant missionary, Paul Nelson. Paul Nelson was this important figure in this whole network. He exhibited American films across the nation in prisons, in hospitals, schools, open public spaces. He also sees the lack of government investment in films, especially educational films. And Paul Nelson was connected to the American Board of Commissioners for, foreign missions. He used educational films. He used future films. He also helped produce films about Turkey. And some of those films were brought back to the United States and shown to American audiences. And they were used to raise funds to help Christians in the region, back in Turkey,

to promote Christian values and so on and so forth. They create this understanding of traditional is bad, modern is good. We should put aside the bad traditional way of doing things and we should use technology. We should produce more. As Americans, we can teach them how to do that. and their economy can develop accordingly. Today, most of Turkey's 19 million people are just about as poorly housed,

as badly paid and as shabbily dressed as were their grandfathers. Eking out a hand-to-mouth living by selling the produce of his small farm in nearby marketplaces, the average rural Turk is still backward and ignorant by Western standards. predominantly a farming country whose transportation is primitive. Think about audiences in 1930s, in 1950s. This is a brand new technology, something that they might have heard of, something that they might have experienced maybe once,

something that they're about to experience, and it shows images in front of you, images that are moving. And some of the first experiences of Turkish audiences, and this is recorded, when they first watched moving images, and this is a global experience, they were concerned that the train that was moving might come and hit them. So they started screaming. They started running away. But they also stayed there because they were curious. They were fascinated that this was healthy.

happening right in front of them. They were complex individuals. They weren't as, oh, these are naive people. They don't know how to watch a film. We need to train them. So it's not as simple as what some of the American sponsored researchers said about these particular people. I think it's really important to understand what the audiences said and did. and read those responses carefully. I dive into that in my last chapter in the audience reception research, and I really complicate the readings of the social scientist, like Daniel Lerner, and the way that he developed his theory around these types of audiences.

Right. The point you're making is very interesting because this is exactly how people, talk about social media today, as if the public just discovered that they were not just consumers, but also participants in like the Society of the Spectacle, as Gieda Borg calls it. It's very clear from your work that people understand the power of this medium from its early rollout. When you see these types of stories over and over again and when you critically analyze what they are doing, it becomes clear that the

This is not just a representational issue, but this is a systematic issue that we are dealing with. And in order to explain that, I rely on critical race theory. And whiteness becomes an ideological lens for me to analyze what we see on the screen, but what we also see within the system. that created these films that allow them to circulate. And it's all about power dynamics. Race is a social construct, right? It's something made up.

But it has real consequences. It affects people's daily lives. And the films and the systems that institutions, government entities, organizations created, lead into these power asymmetries that affect the way you and I understand each other today. There are images, there are politics, there are systems that enabled people to see one another

in ways that allow them to treat each other in certain ways. And your story of film diplomacy is sort of a twofold racialization process. There's the one that's pretty easy for us to read here in America, which is how the United States represents places like Turkey as somehow other in a way that sort of reifies that the U.S. is this like superior, coded white power in the world that's bringing civilization. But then the other side of this is the power that film gives. the state in Turkey or the ruling elite, if we can call it, to shape their own notion of whiteness and to use that same discourse, this paternalist discourse, to reconfigure how people

in Turkey think about one another. To add to your point about this two-fold racialization process, so there's one that's emanating from the United States to the rest of the world, and there's one that's more domestic on the part of the Turkish state towards its population. I was wondering if there's any if there was any tension between these two processes of racialization because you mentioned in your book that film diplomacy has this sort of twofold purpose, one of foreign policy and the other one of domestic projects. One way to think about the tension inside Turkey is through White Turks versus black Turks.

It's not necessarily referring to the skin color. It's a label, right? It's a kind of Turk that is maybe multilingual, secular, modern, and black Turk on the other hand is the opposite, right? It's not necessarily referring to a Syah Turk, right? it's not we're not talking about afro-turks here it's again a label and metaphor perhaps so black turks are traditional they are more on the conservative side monolingual and the turkish films the turkish educational films kind of follow that binary they want to produce films that

encourages audiences to align with the idea of becoming white Turks. And this connects to some of these films that Americans circulated in Turkey, even the one that we watched early on during our conversation, right? Ahmed was talking about the resources of his country and how they could be useful. And his friend, Mike, by the way, is like the blondeest, little boy possible right so here we see that they're like he is the turkish equivalent of mike and mike is him and you see this sort of racial dialogue that's happening they don't look the same but they occupy a similar position somehow right that's kind of what you're going to get i love that film

it's was it has always been my favorite because it's just so interesting it's so rich it looks so simple, there is so much happening in there. There is racialization. It's all constructed. It's not Ahmed that is doing the talking. So let's step back and think about what Turkey and the US and all the people involved in this are getting out of this. And let's take things to the Cold War period because the United States has a very clear aim vis-a-vis Turkey during the early Cold War period. it's going to invest in Turkey in order to shield Turkey from the influences of the Soviet Union and the emerging communist bloc. There's one image in the book where there's a wall drawn around Turkey, like sort of an iron curtain, but except for America, right? And I think for the United States, controlling the discourse film becomes like a means of kind of, kind of,

setting up its own curtain, like to use the kind of theatrical metaphor, right, to have Turkey be ideologically shielded. What does Turkey get out of being part of this American project? And how does that relate to this point you're making about whiteness? Yeah, that's an excellent question. Turkey is after respect and it's after belonging. They want to be accepted so badly. And this goes back to 1937 when Afetinan conducted government-sponsored research to prove that Turks were white. So all these discourses shaped the way people think about modernization. So in order to become modern, people had to be white. They had to perform whiteness. And Turkey did that in the best way it could by participating into the Korean War, they performed whiteness. They created another,

and that was China. That was the communists, right? They played into it. They performed it. They created another. Even within its own dynamic, within the local context, the black Turks were the other. So that's how this idea of whiteness really travels and works around. What brings them together is film. They have very different purposes. Ideologically, they're aligned. Of course, Turkey wants to become modern. Turkey sees United States as a leader.

And Turkey is inspired by what United States has become and wants to become a little America. So United States wants to be a little America. promote free market capitalism, right? Fight against the spread of communism. That's their goal. Turkey in return wants to promote a very particular kind of nationalism

and gain respect across the global stage. And film allows them to achieve that. We also have some international organizations like UNESCO in the story that really become prominent in starting in 1950s and onwards. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the role of these international organizations, namely UNESCO and Turkish educational projects between UNESCO and the Turkish Ministry of Education. Yeah, that's a great question.

There are a lot of different actors in this network, and that's what really is fascinating and identifying who these agents are, how they are connected to one another. It really is a communication network. And UNESCO was involved in this network. And they were prominent across the globe. Turkey is just one node within that larger system. And the way you're phrasing the question is really beautiful

because UNESCO is crucial because it gave educational things. film, some kind of a language of, like it sounds natural. It doesn't sound like propaganda. It's UNESCO, right? But what do you think when you hear UNESCO? Benevolence, right? Progress, heritage. So you think all the good things. In Turkey, UNESCO helped shape the early institutional vision of the educational film center. The Ministry of National Education established ties with UNESCO early on. Some teachers went abroad to study audio-visual technologies and we can trace these through film magazines and UNESCO's archival materials and they worked with UNESCO specialists such as Adolf Hulp. He proposed having a Turkish Film Institute,

film production units, training programs and film archives. His recommendations were shaped by existing European models of educational media. But they were economically unrealistic for Turkey at the time. Adolf Hilp recommended having a film projector in every classroom in Turkey. In 1950, it is very unlikely for every classroom in Turkey to have a film projector. So his recommendations were unrealistic. But he was one of the people. who created the groundwork for convincing Turkish elites to take film seriously, to create an infrastructure.

Another important entity here is the United States Information Services, also known as United States Information Agency. They understood that in order to make this an efficient system, It wasn't enough to just bring in American films and distribute them and exhibit them. They decided quickly. It was important to invest financially and create an infrastructure where filmmakers are trained and produce films for Turkish publics. And that's how the educational film center. was formed. So it was formed through the collaborations between UNESCO agents, United States Information Services, and Ministry of National Education of Turkey. And they all had different stakes in the game.

Missionaries were not directly involved in constructing that infrastructure, but they also created the groundwork. They already were there back from the Ottoman Empire times, right? They had their hospitals. They are not they, I don't think that they had their own prisons. They had their hospitals. They had their schools. And some of those schools and hospitals still exist. So they already had an infrastructure. So when the United States wanted to distribute films in Turkey in 1948, they connected with missionaries. They asked missionaries to distribute some films. about the American leaders, about American presidents, American economy. So they were always in collaboration with one another.

The through line in all these different projects is like a universalizing mission, whether it's the missionaries trying to initially get like Christians and then eventually maybe some Muslims too to like see themselves in American white Christianity essentially or the U.S. trying to have Turkey see itself as part of. of the U.S.'s like global consortium, we won't call it an empire, but also, you know, the Turkish elite trying to get each citizen of the country, many of whom are not ethnically or religiously Turkish in that sense, invested in this universal framing of belonging.

And all that translates into, you know, creation of organizations like this educational film center, which is like trying to kind of achieve that goal, of putting a projector in every classroom or in every village, right, to have this, to create this infrastructure and to get that message out there. So it becomes very intimate. The interesting thing for me, thinking about the 19th century is like how the missionaries were sort of that original version of the people who went into the villages that had this

kind of like tacit ethnographic practice that was part of missionary work. And to see it in this really different form in Turkey a hundred years later, is super fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. To add to your point about this missionary network already existing in Turkey and the state actors tapping into that network in the Cold War period, I just wanted to say that your book definitely changes how diplomacy works because when you look at diplomacy as just like the state,

like the relationship between states, that history focuses too much on the Cold War period for Turkey and the United States. But when you shift the focus away from the state and look at these non-state actors like missionaries, that history turns into something that's broader, larger, and goes back even like before the Cold War because these state actors themselves were utilizing these pre-existing missionary networks. I want to highlight one more important contribution of this work, which is that this is a book about film. but it's not first and foremost a book about cinema. And the question I want to ask you is that given that this film encounter between the U.S. and Turkey is mediated through educational or documentary genre, like non-cinematic genres, sort of being received by a Turkish public,

how did the story you tell in film diplomacy actually influenced Turkish cinema? I love that question in so many ways. Film is not just for entertainment purposes. There are so many reasons why we use film. It goes beyond Hollywood, right? It goes beyond Yechil-Cham. And just focusing on those genres prevents us from seeing what these marginalized forms were able to do, right? I mean, the scholarship around Yehil-Cham and Hollywood, there's excellent work.

But there is also this really interesting work that can be done with these non-theatrical non-fiction films. That's one answer that I have. Another one is Suha Arun. Suha Arun is this amazing documentary filmmaker. He is known as the father of documentary film in Turkey. Suha Arun's own story has to be thought within this network that I identify. Suha Aran produced one of the first films of the Educational Film Center. It was about traffic.

He made a film about how people should pay attention to the traffic lights. So they are safe and how that attention can help the nation increase its economic productivity. There is like the film makes these types of comments. Again, it's black and white based on uses voiceover. And Suha Aran, when he was first approached, he said that he didn't have any experience, but he learned to become a filmmaker. And he came to the United States. He worked for Voice of America.

He worked for, he made films here too. And then he went back to Turkey and made more documentary films. And he was a teacher of film too. So that's one very important influence. Another one that immediately comes to my mind is, you know, how do we see these films in current Turkish cinema culture? Have you heard of this film, Aila? It's a Turkish future.

It's based on the Korean War. And it focuses on the story of this. Korean girl and her relationship with a Turkish soldier. It was Turkey's nominee for the Oscars in 2017, I believe. It's a fascinating story because that film also uses archival footage. It shows training films that United States used to educate Turkish soldiers on certain strategies before going into war. In that film, there is a footage of those training films.

It's fascinating, but also just reading the book. I had like a very meta moment for Ottoman History podcast when I realized that this podcast is a spinoff of film diplomacy in so many ways. And here we are sitting together in this room, me sort of meeting the conversation, the American guy. and the two of you who are both products of this process as well, right? Your educational backgrounds, but also like how you were trained by the Turkish state from a young age to think about how to be Turkish in the world and to prepare for that encounter with Mike. And you've both had those real-life mics over and over again.

That is brilliant, Chris. Okay, well, thank you. You got the point because that was one of my motivations for writing this book. So this is not a book of my own personal history, but it was a motivation for me to understand who I am and why and how I got into where I got. And what did you learn about yourself? I mean, it's, as you said, I'm a product of the system because like when I, the reason why I wanted to study in the United States is because we all have this idea that. US provides the best education. And why? Because the technology, they have the best technology, they have the best system, they have the best people. So it's so appealing. It's so wonderful.

It can give you so much, right? But how do we construct those ideas? One of my arguments is that it's through film and it's not just simply as Hollywood or Yechilcham. It's through the these educational films that entered educational spaces, open public spaces that influence the way that our parents understood United States. Because I can't just come to United States as an 18-year-old. I need to be supported by my family. And how did my family make their opinions? They got exposed to these ideas. And it wasn't. as, oh, they watched the Hollywood movie. It's not that simple.

It's very complex. What was your major at UVA? We have a UVA undergraduate and now professor in the room. Yeah, so I started at the engineering school. I was measuring in electrical engineering, and I wanted to do that because I wanted to design better cameras and better chairs to represent people.

and to have a more comfortable viewing experience. It sounds pretty neat. And I quickly realized, I mean, it wasn't that quickly. After a year, I realized, you know, the questions that I was asking, I wasn't able to get answers to those questions studying the technical aspects of building cameras or chairs. That was great, wonderful, but I realized, no, I need to look into the technical aspects of building cameras or chairs. That was great, wonderful.

But I realized, no, I need to look into a different space. I need to read. I need to learn how to critically understand the essence of what I'm questioning. So then I moved to the college. I studied film with Kevin Everson. I learned how to make 16mm films. I edited films manually. And then I learned how to make films digitally.

So that whole process also affects the way that I think. You know, I was reflecting on how I have by now spend more time in the United States than in Turkey. I grew up in Turkey. I was there until high school. You didn't tell us what your major is. Okay. So I did also study Italian. I double major.

Yes, I double majored film and Italian studies. And I was attracted to Italian studies because I went to an Italian high school. school in Turkey for four years and for one year I did an exchange program in Sardinia which was wonderful I miss Sardinia so much yeah Italian Italian major and film sounds like a very American because of a study abroad experience you see what I'm getting at I very much relate to um what you said Hujam about like being a product of the system because um when I was in high school I did an exchange in the States for a year. It was a state department project

that was created after 9-11 between the U.S. and Muslim majority countries to foster cultural understanding between these two places. And then, like, I grew up in Turkey again, and then I went to Bilkent in Ankara, which is very American. Like, it feels very American.

Now that I'm here in UVIC, see how it was modeled after the American system. But yeah, you grew up thinking that like there's a particular way of living and that particular way of living is very implicitly American. It's not said outright, but there's this idea that like, especially in white Turk circles, there's a particular way of being living and that is modeled after basically America. Now that I'm here, I see it better. I feel like I can understand it better. And your story kind of shows us the product of film diplomacy in the sense of a teenager being an ambassador of the Muslim world in the United States

through this program during the War on Terror. It's fascinating. And to understand how we came to live in that world, we have to understand that co-constituted process. Yeah. And like about being an ambassador, I remember when I was in Italy, they would always put me in front of the stage because I spoke Italian very fluently. And they're like, okay, tell us about your experience in front of hundreds of people.

So this was a program sponsored by Rotary Club. It puts a lot of pressure. You know, like you have to be the best because you are representing your country. Right. Did you ever tell anyone that Turkey is a bridge between two worlds? No, but you're asking a really interesting question. I actually, before going to Italy with Rotary, I actually had this camp with my cohort. Everybody was going to a different country.

And we were given these CDs. Was it a DVD? It was a DVD. and it was a film about Turkey to present Turkey to audiences abroad. You can imagine the visuals, the soundtrack. And whenever someone wanted, I was like, okay, let's watch this film together. I love that you're having me remember that moment. I would show them that film.

And what were they supposed to get out of that viewing? experience. That Turkey is modern. Turkey is beautiful. That you should visit Turkey. The tourism industry is like waiting for you to come and host you and we offer so much the historical spaces, the modern contemporary spaces, everything. It's just like had everything for you. What reading your book does for me and thinking about I'm very familiar with those images from Turkey in the early 2000s, right? Seeing that the audience is not just for abroad, but also people living in Turkey in the 21st century to think, like, yeah, we do live in a beautiful, great country.

Things are great. That's not actually just diplomacy in the international sense, but that's public diplomacy between the state and society. That's the ultimate endgame. Yes, ideally Turkey will be strong on the world stage, but most importantly, it's citizens. will. Exactly. Exactly. So that's what's really fantastic about this book, how it straddles, you know, the global, the local, takes us on that journey across time, the making of modern Turkey,

and its relationship to the U.S. in a fascinating way. We've only scratched the surface in this conversation. So I do encourage our listeners to check out the webpage, try to get a hold of a copy of film diplomacy. Professor Atam, thank you so much for talking to us today. you so much, Chris, and thank you so much, Salah. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you all at home for listening. Check out the webpage as well to find other episodes related to this conversation, including our interview, I think, with Barish-Unlu on the Turkishness contract, one of our most high-profile guests from Turkey. That's all for this episode. Thank you for listening to the Ottoman History Podcast.