Gezici Festival: multiple identities of a traveling film festival in Turkey

Abstract

Through an analysis of Gezici Festival (‘Festival on Wheels’), which has been traveling across Anatolia to bring examples of world cinema to various cities in and around Turkey for 20 years, this study examines the dual role of film festivals in Turkey. The festival is considered both as an educational initiative that introduces audiences to types of filmmaking largely excluded from commercial screens and as an industry-oriented event that promotes recent Turkish films. The dependence on state funding, digitization, and the highly diverse audience demographics in different cities are analyzed in terms of their impact on programming decisions, the choice of cities to be visited, and the festival’s evolution over two decades. Focusing on a festival sometimes organized in cities without even a theater to speak of, this study aims to contribute to the literature on film festivals and mobile exhibition units by investigating an event reminiscent of a contemporary cinema troupe. Two interviews with the festival team and a historiographical analysis of the festival archives based in Ankara are interwoven throughout the inquiry.

Keywords:

• Film festivals
• mobile film exhibition
• Turkish cinema
• Gezici Festival
• film education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘About the Festival’, http://ankarasinemadernegi.org/en/festival-hakkinda/, accessed on 30 March 2015. As the interviews used in this study, (February 12, 2015 and Yusufoğlu 2014) took place in Turkish, I translated them to English myself and avoided direct quotations.

2. Information regarding the festival dates, the cities visited, and the films screened can be found for all 20 editions of Gezici Festival on its website: http://ankarasinemadernegi.org/festivals/, accessed on 30 March, 2015.

3. The focus on European cinema can also be associated with the support the festival received from relevant European institutions. The festival was sponsored by the Representation of the European Commission to Turkey during the period when it exclusively screened European films.

4. The first decade of the festival witnessed a collapse in local film production with fewer than a dozen films made in some years. With no local blockbusters, mainstream theatrical releases were almost entirely American productions from Hollywood.

5. NISI MASA is a non-profit organization that cooperates with partner institutions in Europe in order to help young professionals to establish themselves in the film industry. While there is no official partner in Turkey, NISI MASA has collaborated with many Turkish festivals including Gezici Festival. The name of the organization refers to 8½ (Otto e Mezzo, Federico Fellini, 1963).

6. The lack of freedom of expression in Turkey has become a widely debated topic in recent years. Some recent indicators of the issue include the following: YouTube and Twitter were briefly banned under a new, regressive Internet law in 2014; after holding the top spot in 2012 and 2013, Turkey maintained its position as one of the top 10 countries with the highest number of journalists jailed by state entities, and was ranked 149th out of 180 countries in the 2015 World Press Freedom Index.