In this paper, I explore the politics and aesthetics of a recent orientation in contemporary Turkish cinema that engages with different aspects of the provincial/peripheral (‘ta?ra’). This new orientation finds expression in the works of renowned filmmakers such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Semih Kaplano?lu but also in the internationally lesser-known yet equally significant works of Ümit Ünal, Belma Ba?, Ya?mur and Durul Taylan, Reha Erdem and the late Ahmet Uluçay. My entry point into the analysis of this new trend is the concept of ‘ta?ra,’ which has been produced as a deeply marked and slippery concept in the culturo-political topography of Turkey. Although commonly used to refer to a geographical location, to those parts of the country that are outside of big cities, ‘ta?ra’ also connotes a rather hierarchical and awkward relationship between the center(s) and the peripheries. Particularly with the onset of the Turkish modernization project, ‘ta?ra’ has come to signify a rather ambivalent and ambiguous space. On the one hand, defined largely in terms of deprivation, insularity, and traditionalism as opposed to the social and economic plenitude, modern and enlightened politico-intellectual-scape of the center, ta?ra was abjected as some spatially and temporally, and indeed ontologically, yonder domain. As such, it had to be developed, regulated and brought into maturity/modernity. On the other hand, the same hegemonic narratives of modernization simultaneously produced ‘ta?ra’ as an element to establish the authenticity of the emerging ‘nation’ and its difference from the West. Here, ta?ra signified the unadulterated native self. Infused with nostalgia and mystification, ta?ra was codified as the “repository of folk wisdom;” benevolent, forbearing and dignified, ‘ta?ra folks’ were often pitted against the menacing figures of the ‘over-westernized,’ self-centered, inauthentic urbanites. Although the social(ist)-realist films of the 1960s and 70s, to a limited extent, questioned these dominant narratives of modernization around ‘ta?ra’, it is in the recent trend in Turkish cinema that I locate not only more complex and nuanced articulations of the concept of ‘ta?ra’ but also a real encounter with it. Through the analysis of particular scenes, I try to argue that these films contain moments where the boundaries between center/periphery, authenticity/ inauthenticity, inside/outside are blurred and/or dislocated in such a way so as to reveal that ‘ta?ra’ is not simply the sign of an ‘other’ space, but is the constitutive outside of the modern subject who is marked by some fundamental loss and its bereavement.