Your Turn as an Example of Multi-Modal, Ethnographic and Collective Documentary

Documentary cinema is a film genre that aims to reproduce authentic reality and provide awareness to the audience by addressing real events, people or subjects with a claim of objectivity. Such films generally use a narrative language that is not based on fiction and reflect reality as it is. There are several standpoints a documentary film-maker may follow and adopt. These standpoints usually determine the formal characteristics of the film. A documentary may be ethnographic, journalistic, poetic, etc. Likewise, a documentary film-maker may seek to approach reality without any self-involvement and he/she may choose to observe rather than participate in the content or vice versa. Utilizing a number of methods, documentary cinema has flourished in both content and form in recent years. New ways of making documentaries are flourishing and minor realities as well as major ones are brought to the audience. One approach is the ethnographic documentary, where the filmmaker adopts a participant-observer role, immersing themselves in the socio-cultural phenomenon to authentically convey a particular truth. Taking ethnography as a starting point, a film-maker makes numerous stylistic choices and enrich his/her narrative following different patterns. This study aims to interrogate the prospects of documentary cinema in recent years and define the relationship between the film-maker’s standpoint and the stylistic choices he/she makes, using the film Your Turn (Capai, 2019) as a case study. The sample film was chosen via purposive sampling method and a textual analysis was conducted. The results of the analysis shows that Your Turn (Capai, 2019) utilizes ethnography and turn the participant-observation method into a collective practice which contributes to the overall aesthetics of the film as well as its narrative foundation.