Eset declines to say which thinktank commissioned him, except to hint that a former Bush administration undersecretary was involved with the institute. I am standing in the drizzle in a bleak parking lot on the Asian side of Istanbul in front of a white van. A man named Ferhat hands me a Glock 19 pistol. It is the same model Turkish soldiers use, he says, as he swings open the van doors.
Inside, there is a rocket-launcher lying on the floor and about 60 other weapons hanging on racks. Men in military uniform prowl across the parking lot.
All around us there are street signs in Arabic and extras in cheap suits. They are filming episode A demolition expert saunters by, chatting to a man in a balaclava while an actor rehearses a scene, holding a rifle in each hand.
Tims has always had an international outlook, I am told. They tried to cast Hollywood stars for Magnificent Century, and were reportedly close to signing Demi Moore to play a European princess until her divorce from Ashton Kutcher got in the way.
Soldiers are everywhere, blazing through the wreckage of suicide bombings at shopping malls and hunting terrorists who are hard at work kidnapping pregnant women. By the s, women in all public institutions, including universities, were banned from covering their heads.
Five minutes on the streets of Istanbul presents multiple encounters with women in headscarves, yet they are nowhere to be seen on screen. Every time I looked down at my notebook, I explain, by the time I looked up again, everyone in the scene seemed to have been murdered. Who are the terrorists supposed to be? Arat, a delicate, strawberry-blond woman in a business suit, laughs.
He sets the tone for the dizi industry at large and, today, he is preparing an English adaptation of Magnificent Century. He is not the least bit interested in taking American shows and remaking them in Turkish. Dizi have yet to penetrate the English-speaking world. You know, the saying that MBC is a family channel is not a just a slogan. It really is because it begins with everyone involved being like family. I really feel at home here. Here are seven things we found out from the stars at the event:.
Veteran Egyptian actress Yousra looked dazzling and in good health after recovering from Covid last year. She told The National how the pandemic became a rallying point for the wider Arab entertainment industry.
In addition to appearing in various MBC shows over the years, including as a special guest on Project Runway, Yousra also chose to work with the broadcaster to make her film comeback. After finding success in the critically-acclaimed Netflix drama The Platform , Emirati actor Mahira Abdel Aziz is ready to make her debut on the big screen.
What I can say about it is that it's about the wrestling world, but told in a very funny and new way. Nasser Al Qasabi in 'Al Assouf'. Courtesy MBC. Fran: There has been a lot of interest in Australia in immunotherapy because in the melanoma world of course immunotherapy has really transformed the lives of many people with metastatic disease and of course Australia has been very involved in those trials, what is your take on some of the roles of immunotherapies in metastatic breast cancer?
Fran: Certainly would be my impression with them treating my patients with melanoma with them that there is no free lunch and these are drugs that can have significant side effects when you turn on the immune system and get angry at the cancer and it often gets angry at other things as well and they certainly need to be administered by people who are very experienced for looking after they very different side effects from chemo… so as we are going to wrap up here Fatima, what about supportive care you mentioned that at the outset the things that women should be asking their oncologist to help them with in terms of their supportive care?
Fran: there was a very provocative study presented at ASCO this year about a system that would allow patients to send in and connect their symptoms and there side-effects experiencing that are just waiting for them on consultation time to come up and that would allow the nurse to get action happening if they had back pain issues or vomiting or whatever it was and not surprisingly of course that meant that patients felt better but what was a bit surprising perhaps was that they also lived longer and I think that really underlines the importance of supportive care that if someone manages your pain well then you will get up and out of bed and get moving and be interested in coming in for more treatment and if your pain is totally out of control and your disappearing out of yourself.
I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding in Europe and in America, both on the left and the right to be honest. But when I talk to Iraqis, Egyptians, Iranians and Syrians, though they are a bit different for obvious reasons, Istanbul is where they wanted to end up.
Fatima: I think there is a complete misunderstanding. People migrating are not running to the West. Most migration is internal and, as you said, for a Syrian or Iranian, Turkey is much closer to home in many ways. It is a more accessible and attractive option. I think that the West is hysterical at the moment on this point. I think this also comes from a general Western misperception that they are the centre of the universe, that nowhere else exists with an interest in the values of freedom and justice.
All this is becoming transparent. Luke: I think this pull that Turkey seems to have on other Middle Eastern nations becomes an issue of soft power. I was wondering if you would be able to talk about the televisions rivalry that has developed between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Fatima: I think that it is quite interesting that the first order of business for M.
C, once it had its new owners, was to cancel Turkish television. S is the new owner. At the time, the spokesman said he was not at liberty to say who took the decision, but I think it points to the incredible importance of popular culture and culture in general. It is often dismissed as frivolous entertainment.
But it is clearly more than that. Soft power is an accompaniment to hard power. It is a necessary arm of diplomatic relations and obviously the capturing of hearts and minds we see playing out between Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Following all these tensions, not just political but trade tensions as well. The first hit was culture. You understand how people are threatened. It makes sense that it would be the first thing to go, that that would be the immediate response. The point is that thanks to the internet people have access to other products.
What I noticed after that whole incident was that Turkish online streaming platforms seem to be pushing themselves more towards middle eastern audiences. Fatima: There is no way that they can do that. Saudi Arabia needs more than one hundred years before it can have even a slight push on soft power. I mean, this is a country which allowed women to vote just two years ago, that used to jail women for driving up until one year ago.
There is no way that they can present themselves in an effective way for soft power. The first rule of soft power is that the power behind it has to be seen as credible. You know the Saudis are trying and they have got a lot of money. They are bringing in Instagram influencers as if that is going to make a difference. They are trying to lure people over.
Luke: I noticed that your book focuses on K-pop, Bollywood and Turkish television and although none of these countries have the greatest histories of democracy, they are all broadly free societies.
I wonder if that is what makes the success of Turkish TV irreplaceable in that there is still quite a bit of creative freedom in Turkey despite the political situation.
Fatima: I think that all these countries, now that you bring them up, have struggled with dictatorships and authoritarianism. They are all democracies vulnerable to authoritarianism and have experienced their fair share of violence, but I think that is why their pop cultures are so alluring.
This is because a country in that uncertain space, in the terrain between freedom and authoritarianism, knows very well the importance of how one is presented. Pop culture is ultimately, especially if we are talking about movies or television, a fantasy of how a nation sees themselves and how they wish to be perceived. You can read so much about what a country wants to share of itself and what it wants to keep secret from the culture it produces.
In that sense I think that none of these are replicable. There is no singing or dancing but they are very artistic, tension filled, nuanced productions. I think that is the trend Pakistan are working towards in film too, which is still quite a new industry. Dizi itself as well would be so difficult to replicate. You know, their local competitors would have been Egyptians or Syrians. The Egyptians, of course, were very melodramatic when it came to television. They Syrians were less melodramatic, but again they produced very sophisticated, nuanced and literary dramas, but very short.
K-pop is the one I wonder about because the Chinese have obviously learned a lot from being such big consumers of K-pop but also by having their own Mandarin-speaking stars in the industry.
I think the Chinese might be able to do it. The point I think is that the Koreans are so innovative that before something is tried they have already reformed it. One of the biggest studios S. It is kind of clever, like taking the Beatles, the Monkeys and the Stones and putting the best ones together into a super group. Fatima: Exactly.
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