My Father and My Son · reception & legacy
2005 · Çağan Irmak
How My Father and My Son has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A word-of-mouth phenomenon in Turkey in 2005 — around 3.5 million admissions made it one of the year's most-watched films — and it never really cooled off: two decades on it still sits at or near the top of best-Turkish-films-ever lists.
What's debated
The perennial fight is over its towering IMDb score (8.3 from a passionate home crowd): is it genuinely one of the great films, or a beloved national tearjerker whose rating says more about Turkish voters' devotion than world-cinema consensus?
Its footprint
In Turkey it's shorthand for guaranteed crying — 'the film that made the whole country weep' — and having sobbed through it is practically a national rite of passage; it's also widely credited with bringing the 1980 coup back into mainstream popular cinema.
Where it stands
The default 'you must have seen this' Turkish film — the entry point non-Turkish Letterboxd users are handed when they ask where to start with Turkish cinema.