The Body as Battleground: Property, Violence, and Resistance in Metin Erksan’s Kuyu (The Well)

Metin Erksan’s 1968 film Kuyu (The Well) is a radical cinematic interrogation of bodily autonomy, gendered violence, the illusion of property, set against the stark backdrop of rural Anatolia. Through the harrowing ordeal of Fatma—a woman subjected to abduction, rape, systemic coercion—the film dismantles the conflation of possession with ownership, asserting the body’s inalienability as property. Drawing on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s critique of property, Marxist labor theory, Frantz Fanon’s dialectics of violence, this article argues that The Well exposes the ideological sleight-of-hand by which patriarchal, colonial regimes mistake domination for rightful claim. Fatma’s suicide, framed as an act of abusus (the right to destroy what one owns), becomes the ultimate assertion of agency, challenging the gendered, theological foundations of ownership. The film’s subversive use of Quranic misquotation, metaphors further critiques religious complicity in women’s commodification. While the conclusion’s fatalism risks reinforcing cycles of oppression, The Well transcends its historical moment to offer a universal commentary on resistance, positioning the body as the ultimate site of political struggle. Through interdisciplinary analysis, this article situates Erksan’s work within anti-colonial, feminist discourses, revealing its enduring relevance to debates on sovereignty, violence, freedom.