Children in an open world: Mobility as ontology in New Iranian and Turkish cinema

Abstract

In a series of non-Western films — Times and Winds, A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly and Buddha Collapsed out of Shame — contemporary child figures inhabit their world in a manner that demonstrates the child’s resilience and their intimacy with the land. Drawing on non-representational theory (NRT) and relating this to feminist theories of affect and subjectivity, the article suggests that these films present child figures for whom mobility has effectively become their ontology and that this demonstrates that there may be a different form of kinship between the natural world and the child. This is not to romanticize this connection or to essentialize the child: this relationship is revealed to be not idyllic but affectively ‘open’ in a way that may be terrifying as well as liberating.