Only two weeks since President Obama’s departure (on his first state visit to Turkey) and ‘Obama mania’ is still the talk of the town in a city that is home to an estimated 14 million people. It was even more timely – or as Turks say ‘kismet’ – that the annual 28th Istanbul International Film Festival, which began on April 4 and ended last Saturday night, coincided with this fervour.
Organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Art and Culture, and with an estimated attendance of 170,000 cinephiles and professionals alike, the festival awarded the coveted Golden Tulip Award in the International competition to the Chilean film Tony Manero by Pablo Larrain. The jury was presided over by filmmaker Goran Paskaljevic and consisted of film critic Mike Goodridge, Berlin International Film Festival programmer Claudia Landsberger, Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu and Turkish director Ümit Ünal.
Equally, the national competition jury that was presided over by contemporary Turkish artist Kutluğ Ataman and consisted of consultant editor of the Time Out Film Guide, Geoff Andrew; author Ayşe Kulin; producer Zeynep Özbatur; Sarajevo Film Festival director Mirsad Purivatra; and actress Benu Yıldırımlar, awarded the best film to Men On The Bridge.
The festival had a full program offering a selection of approximately 200 films, most of which had already been screened at the world’s leading film festivals but were being premiered in Turkey. In addition to the festival’s traditional categories of ‘From The World of Festivals,’ ‘Young Masters’ and ‘Mine Field’, new categories like ‘Country Silver, Cinema Gold: Argentina’ and ‘Aşkolsun!’ (which roughly means ‘Amazing!’ in Turkish) were included. Memorable cinema classics were also shown in the categories, ‘Rebels, Saints, Lovers’ and ‘In Memory Of’.
This year, as with every year, the festival atmosphere reigned in Istanbul for two weeks in a series of parties, cinema classes, workshops (with Peter Greenway and François Ozon, to name just two), interviews (with John Malkovich, who was on hand to collect a ‘Lifetime Tribute to Cinema’ award) and panel discussions (that were participated in by high ranking executives from Film Four and the UK Film Council).
Most notable of all was the emergence of a new breed of independent Turkish filmmakers – a sort of post Nuri Bilge Ceylan (pictured above) and Fatih Akin if you will, both of whom previously set the European festival circuit alight by introducing a new perspective in stories told either about or set around Turkey. One of these newly emerging filmmakers is Asli Özge – whose award winner Men On The Bridge is about a Germany-based Turk – who considers herself very much Turkish in identity but admits that she does not fall into the category of being a Turkish or German filmmaker. She says: “I’m just a female director telling stories from within a male dominated society in Turkey, but from a female perspective.” Asli Özge further explains that not only does she currently seek world-wide distribution for her present film but that her next project is going to be produced by Waltz With Bashir’s producer Roman Paul.
Other notable Turkish filmmakers who had their work screened at the festival included the charming 2009 International Rotterdam Film Festival’s prize winner Wrong Rosary directed by Mahmut Fazıl Coşkun, and also the hard-hitting Sundance Institute funded documentary, The Visitor by Melis Birder. On another note, Armenian filmmaker Hasmik Hovhannisyan drew attention to the bridging of differences between Turkey and Armenia through her proposed workshop entitled Golden Apricot Master School, which she hoped would nurture, educate and promote Armenian-Turkish short films from up and coming filmmakers from both nations.
With the year 2010 marking Istanbul as the cultural capital of Europe, much has been discussed in what lies ahead both financially and artistically for the film community. It is quite obvious that Istanbul is currently becoming a hot spot with the diversity of independent films and filmmakers that the city nourishes. While a lot of attention is directed to the political question of whether Turkey will or will not be accepted into the EU, there is no doubt that its strongly independent artististic community is already laying the foundations by offering to European audiences a different but highly attractive cultural perspective.
