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Interactive film atlas
Mapping
An interactive geography of Turkish cinema. Explore where films were shot, how cinematic attention moves across the country, and how those patterns change over time.
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Colour by
Concentration and spread
Retrospective
İstanbul accounted for around three quarters of filming before 1980 and under half since 2010, while the number of provinces used in a single year has risen from a handful to more than thirty. Every chart follows the filters and the province selected on the atlas.
Current analytical viewTurkey
Film production over the years
1918—2026
Turkey
Hover a year for detail · drag the range or click a year
191819401960198020002026
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Genre mix
Share of genre tags each year.
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Provinces filmed each year
How widely filming spread much denser toward the present.
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Kurdish-language films
Films with Kurdish among their spoken languages, per year.
Behind the Map
01Data & Methods+
This project uses IMDb film data, limited to films whose country of origin is Turkey and which have at least one location entry. The map therefore cannot cover every Turkish film.
First location
Each film is counted once, in the province of the first location IMDb lists. That makes province totals additive rather than overlapping. IMDb's location order is not a ranking. A film shot in several provinces appears in only one here, and the first listed location may not be the main shooting site. Note also that this is filming location, not necessarily narrative setting.
İstanbul and Anatolia
In the İstanbul-against-Anatolia chart, Anatolia means every province except İstanbul. The two shares are exact complements, so the 50% line is the point where one overtakes the other.
Genre shares
Films carry more than one genre tag, so the genre chart shows shares of tags, not of films. Drama, Comedy, War and History are tracked individually; everything else is grouped as Other.
Ordering by rating
Within a province, films are ordered by a Bayesian weighted rating rather than the raw IMDb score: WR = (v / (v + m)) × R + (m / (v + m)) × C, where R is the film's rating, v its vote count, m = 500, and C the mean rating across all rated films in this dataset (5.4). Voting here is thin — the median film has around 300 votes — so an unweighted sort lets a 7.6 drawn from 22 votes outrank a 7.0 drawn from 81,000. Weighting pulls sparsely voted films toward the mean until they carry enough votes to hold their own score. A hard vote threshold was rejected because it would have removed 11 of the 78 provinces from view entirely, discarding exactly the small-province cinema this atlas sets out to map. No film is excluded, and the rating shown on each entry is the unmodified IMDb figure; only the ordering is derived. The 250 films with no rating sort last rather than counting as zero.
Source terms
Location, rating and language data derive from IMDb. This project is for informational, non-commercial purposes. Check IMDb's current terms before redistributing the underlying location data.
02About Me+
Hello!
I'm Merve, a Political Science PhD student at the University of Washington, Seattle. I work on political behavior, inequality, distributive politics, and Turkish politics.
Questions, corrections, and pointers to films the map has missed are always welcome: edeer@uw.edu