Zeki Demirkubuz as a Creator of Meaning: A Critique of the Film Hayat

This article examines Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz’s Hayat (2023) and the influence of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus on the film’s narrative and characters. The central research question concerns how the intellectual worlds of these two writers shaped the construction of Hayat’s story and protagonists. Demirkubuz’s primary aim in Hayat is to portray, in practical terms, the typical features of characters living through an existential crisis and to indicate the possible paths toward its resolution. Both Dostoevsky and Camus devote significant attention to the basic and shared manifestations of existential crisis, but they differ on the question of overcoming this crisis. In Hayat, Demirkubuz thematizes the Dostoevskian resolution while also incorporating Camus’s conception of the absurd character. Viewed in this light, the director constructs a unique world of meaning; accordingly, he can be evaluated as an auteur in the sense of a meaning creator. This is the article’s working hypothesis. To substantiate this claim, the article first outlines the intellectual frameworks of Dostoevsky and Camus and then subsequently analyzes Hayat’s narrative and characters in relation to them.