Biyograficim
Yakılacak Kitap

The Book to Be Burned (Yakılacak Kitap) (translated)

Movie · 1968 · 3 people

Süreyya Duru directed Yakılacak Kitap ("The Book to Be Burned"), a black-and-white Yeşilçam melodrama from 1968 with a script by Remzi Jöntürk, produced by Naci Duru's Duru Film. It is the second Yeşilçam adaptation of Etem İzzet Benice's 1927 novel and runs eighty-two minutes. It is also one of Nazan Şoray's first films, made at fourteen.

On a village road near Istanbul a stranger gives birth to a daughter, Vicdan, and dies, having hidden a letter in her medallion. Vicdan is pushed around by her keeper and then a villager, until the wealthy Hidayet Bey and his wife adopt her. Their son Ömer resents her over the inheritance and harms her. After a plane crash takes her adoptive parents, she becomes a doctor and falls for Vecdet, but her trust in men is shaken and she goes to Anatolia on duty. There, protected by the school principal Salih Baba, she wins the townspeople's affection, until Ömer reappears and a killing brings new disasters. Nazan Şoray plays Vicdan, Ekrem Bora Vecdet and Tanju Gürsu Ömer.

Ali Şen, Müjdat Gezen, Mualla Sürer, Metin Yalçınkaya and Kayhan Yıldızoğlu are also in the cast. Built on melodrama staples such as lost identity and supposed siblinghood, it ends happily; the novel is less hopeful.

DirectorSüreyya Duru
Production companyDuru Film

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Cast

Nazan Şoray Nazan Şoray Actor · 72 years old Ekrem Bora Ekrem Bora Actor · died at 80 Tanju Gürsu Tanju Gürsu Actor · died at 77

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Through different eyes

Yeşilçam Nostalgic A viewer raised on the classics, looking for warm storytelling and strong acting.

Seeing Nazan Şoray at fourteen, in one of her very first films, is moving in itself. That young face in black and white makes everything Vicdan endures all the more touching. Adapted from Etem İzzet Benice's novel, with its lost identity, a letter hidden in a medallion and trust put to the test, this is Yeşilçam melodrama through and through. Fitting so much sorrow and reunion into eighty-two minutes is no easy task, and some transitions feel rushed. But the image of the young doctor winning the hearts of an Anatolian town is a fine reminder of the moral warmth of our old cinema.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

Yakılacak Kitap is an interesting document of how 1960s Yeşilçam looked at women. An orphaned girl passed from hand to hand, an inheritance that breeds hostility inside a family, and a heroine who ends up posted to Anatolia as a doctor: together they set the era's belief in fate beside its ideal of rising through education. The protection she receives from the school principal Salih Baba suggests that a woman on her own was still seen as needing a guardian. It also matters that the novel is less hopeful, since the film chose to give its audience a brighter path. That choice says a lot about how the commercial cinema of the period worked.

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

Directed by Süreyya Duru from a script by Remzi Jöntürk, Yakılacak Kitap gathers the genre's stock devices into a single film: lost identity, supposed siblinghood, a resentful adoptive brother, one disaster after another. That is exactly where the trouble begins. A structure that packs so many events into eighty-two minutes leaves the characters little room to breathe, and the turning points chase each other before they have had time to ripen dramatically. Jöntürk's script seems more interested in getting through the novel's material quickly than in deepening it. On the other hand, the young Nazan Şoray's screen presence already hints at the career to come. Valuable for anyone curious about genre history, but structurally a flawed example.

These are not reader reviews: they are short editorial takes written from different viewer perspectives with AI assistance. Reader reviews are below.

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