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“Turkish stars Tatlıtuğ and Öden visit Dubai” – Hürriyet Daily News

Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ. Hürriyet Photo

“Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ and Songül Öden, leading actors of the series titled “Noor,” are visiting Dubai to promote the Istanbul Shopping Fest, which will take place between July 9 and 29 this year. This year’s festival will be the second ever festival.

Speaking at a press conference, manager Füsun Sönmez introduced the festival. Tatlıtuğ said he had been visiting Dubai for many years, and added that he was very happy to see the interest in Turkish soap operas in Dubai and the wider Middle East.

Tatlıtuğ said he was proud to present Turkey and was very happy to contribute to the representation of Turkey in other countries as an actor.

He added that he had received a number of film proposals from the Middle East and said, “if the scenario is good, I would like to play in one of the projects.”

Öden agreed that it was very important to see the interest in Turkish series’ in other countries, and said that it helped to keep the relations between two cultures. “We would like to be in front of the audience with better projects. I would like to be a part of an Arabic project.

”The presentation in Dubai was the first stop on the festival’s promotional tour, before the team travels on to Baku in Azerbaijan and Belgrade in Serbia.”

Source : Hürriyet Daily News

“$30,000 paid for hour-long series” – Hürriyet Daily News

"Turkish TV series ‘Nour’ immediately became a hit when it was shown on Saudi sattellite channel in 2008." Source : Hürriyet

“The high production values of dubbed Turkish television dramas, which are extremely popular in Arab households, pose a huge challenge, experts say, according to a report in the United Arab Emirates-based newspaper Gulf News on April 1.

The remarkably popular Turkish series are increasingly becoming a source of delight for sponsors and advertisers on Arab television channels, the newspaper said. The demand for Turkish drama has increased, especially with the decreasing output of the two important TV production cities of the Arabic-speaking world, Cairo and Damascus, due to the political turmoil in both countries in the past year.

But expansion into this market has its price. As the economic rule goes, an increase in demand leads to an increase in prices. Some experts in the industry believe that the increasing prices of Turkish dramas will eventually lead to a shift in demand. The high prices that Turkish series command have begun to suggest to TV networks the necessity of searching for a new profit window.

Adeeb Khair, general manager and owner of Sama Art Productions, a Syrian TV-production company which dubs Turkish dramas into colloquial Syrian Arabic, was quoted as saying, “Several years back, I bought a one-hour (one hour of copyright) Turkish drama for $600 or $700. Today, there are [those] who are willing to pay $40,000 for one-hour dramas.”

“This has opened the door for Turkish [production] companies to reconsider their prices and say they won’t sell for less than $30,000 [for a one-hour show]. This will create a problem. Who will buy them and take such a risk?” Khair said, speaking to Gulf News. His Damascus-based company has already dubbed nearly 60 Turkish dramas in the last four years.

Success of ‘Nour’

The series “Gümüş,” sold in Arabic-speaking markets under the name of “Nour,” the name of the main character in the dubbed Turkish drama, which was shown on the Saudi-owned MBC satellite channel in 2008, immediately became a hit, according to Gulf News. The high ratings it got were partly due to its unconventional use of colloquial Arabic. Non-Arabic dramas used to be more commonly dubbed into classical Arabic.

Another Turkish series popular in Arab households is “Aşk-ı Memnu” (Forbidden Love). It was among the top 10 series in Egypt last year.

The duration of Turkish dramas, some of which can exceed 100 episodes, also helps bring in advertising, because viewers get hooked on a series and become loyal to the channel that airs it.

“Once you get someone hooked, it is not just 20 or 30 episodes, it is 60 or 70 or maybe 90 episodes, so you actually guarantee an audience for a long time,” Veda Rizk, a Dubai-based TV and marketing consultant, told Gulf News.”

Source : Hürriyet Daily News

“Turkish soap operas in the Arab world: social liberation or cultural alienation? ” – Arab Media & Society

http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=735

“In 1980 oil magnate J.R. Ewing was shot and injured in the hit series Dallas, which featured an unconventional family’s struggles over power, wealth and sex. The shot was heard around the world, with millions of fans desperately wondering “Who shot J.R.?”. It was the first time that a TV series had captivated simultaneously so many people around the world. Five years later, the Arabs were shooting at the stars with the launch of the first Arab satellite system, Arabsat-1. Except for experts and visionaries, no one was predicting that it was “the beginning of the end” for the state domination of television in the Arab world.

Almost a quarter of a century later, on August 30, 2008, 85 million Arab viewers were glued to their TV sets for the finale of the Syrian-dubbed Turkish soap opera, Gümüş1 (Noor2 in Arabic), a Kanal D production that received little attention in its homeland in 2005. After falling in the past for Victoria Principal, Ridge Forrester, and Latin American telenovela characters Kassandra and Rosalinda , Arab audiences are now turning to Turkey, a close yet estranged neighbor with whom they share a tumultuous history.

The mastermind behind this phenomenon has been the MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Center) media empire, a combination of Saudi capital and Middle Eastern know-how, and a success story that started in the 1990s with the birth of a private Arab media field. As Naomi Sakr explains, many factors fuel the field’s potential including the fact that “Media flows are (…) facilitated where the language is shared3”. The Arab market is indeed unique: a large and essentially young audience with some 20 countries sharing a common language. Researchers have thus observed a relative “depoliticization” of media over the years with the progressive development of mass entertainment programming. […]”

Link to complete article in pdf

Source : Arab Media & Society

 

 

“The Turkish Soap Opera “Noor”, More Real than Life” – Qantara

Photographs depicting the lead characters of Turkish TV soap 'Noor' are being arranged in a factory in the West Bank city of Hebron. Source : Qantara

” From Saudi Arabia to Morocco: Every evening the Turkish series “Noor” draws millions of people to their television sets. The show is about love, intimacy and equality; no social taboo is ignored. Some see in “Noor” proof of social change, others only fiction. Alfred Hackensberger reports

[…] This is male behavior that women here only know from Western film productions and that does not occur in Arab TV productions. For many female viewers gentle Mohannad is a male ideal.

“Our society”, explains the Vice President of Bahrain’s Women’s Union, Fatima Rabea, “is not accustomed to such intimacy and love. We are so busy with our everyday lives that a loving relationship takes a back seat. The TV series ‘Noor’ has now awakened the desire for this.”

“Satanic and immoral,” is how the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia described the Turkish television series “Noor” while demanding that TV stations immediately cancel this “attack on God and his prophets”.

In the Palestinian city of Nablus a member of the parliament and preacher from the radical Islamist party Hamas warned against the series, which violates “religion, values, and tradition”.

The criticism from both conservative dignitaries is not directed solely at the liberal TV role model of man and woman. The Turkish soap opera has broken other social taboos in conservative Muslim societies, which has also contributed to the success of the series. […]”

Source : Qantara.de