NINETEENTH ISTANBUL FILM FESTIVAL
'The train began to move, silently of course. Good
gracious! It was heading straight for us. There was a rustling movement
in the pitch black room. Evidently some people had left their chairs,
afraid that the train might plunge out of the screen and run them
over. I must admit I was a little scared myself, but curiosity got
the better of me and nailed me to my chair. Thankfully the train
quickly passed by...'
So Ercüment Ekrem Talu's described one of the
first film showings at Sponeck beer house in Galatasaray, Istanbul,
in 1896. He had been watching the famous short film by the Lumieres
entitled L'arrive d'un train en gare de la Ciotat. The reactions
of Istanbul cinema audiences have changed a lot since these first
showings by Sigmund Weinberg, a Romanian Jew. But what has not changed
is the curiosity which nailed those first film goers to their chairs
(now of course replaced by upholstered seats).
The hundred year history of cinema might well be
described as the endeavour to keep that curiosity alive, and indeed
to raise it to a greater pitch.
Since those early film shows, the story of cinema
in Turkey has been closely bound up with Istanbul. It was here that
the first Turkish film was made, where the film industry put down
roots, and where the coutry'si foremost cinema event, the International
Film Festival was born and flourished.
Istanbul Film Festival, which has been organised
for the past nineteen years by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture
and Arts, adds its own festive mood to the spring season for afficionados
of cinema. It might seem strange to shut oneself up in a dark stuffy
cinema with the blue skies and blossom-laden trees of spring outside,
but that is the irresistible contradiction of cinema: leaving the
real world outside to encounter real life on the screen.
Istanbul Film Festival promises viewers amusing/
tragic/phantasmal/poetic journeys inside a dark room. It is like
a two-week package tour.
Today one of the world's major film festivals, International
Istanbul Film Festival began life like so many of its counterparts
as a modest affair. In the summer of 1982 just six films were shown
for Film Week as part of the International Istanbul Festival. The
following year, under the name Cinema Days, 36 films were shown
spread out over a month, and in 1984 Cinema Days split away from
the Istanbul Festival to become an event in its own right held in
April. The next year two competitions were added to the programme,
one international and the other national.
The first Golden Tulip was awarded to International
Competition entry '1984' by Michael Radford. Cinema Days grew steadily,
and in 1989 renamed itself the International Istanbul Film Festival.
That year the festival featured 163 films from 39
countries and achieved record ticket sales of 131,000. That year
the International Jury eclipsed those of Cannes, with Theo Angelopoulos
as jury president and Nikita Mihalkov and Krzystof Kieslowsky among
the jury members.
Over the years the festival has welcomed many celebrated directors
as guests, including Bernardo Bertolucci, Elia Kazan, Gillo Pontecorvo,
Emir Kusturica, Alain Tanner, Percy Adlon, Arturo Ripstein, Arthur
Penn, Robert Wise, Nagisha Oshima, Margarethe von Trotta, Wim Wenders,
Fernando Solanas, Claude Miller, Jiri Menzel, Chantal Ackerman,
Yusuf Sahin and Abbas Kiarostami. This year the nineteenth International
Istanbul Film Festival brings over 150 films, including four major
films by Theo Angelopoulos, who is once more the festiv'sos guest.
Other highlights will be nine films by Robert Bresson who died at
the end of 1999, five major films selected from the filmography
of Ken Loach, films by Takeshi Kitano, the latest films by directors
like Pedro Almodovar, Atom Egoyan, Giuseppe Tornatore, Paul Cox,
Mike Figgis and Michael Winterbottom, a documentary by Wim Wenders
entitled Buena Vista Social Club, and Charlie Chaplin's City Lights,
which will be shown to a live orchestra accompaniment.
The World Festivals section, which is the chance to see award-winning
or critically acclaimed films from festivals around the world unlikely
to get commercial showings, features the latest films by Abbas Kiarostami,
Nikita Mihalkov, Steven Soderbergh, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Alexander
Sokurov, Patrice Leconte, Chen Kaige, Otar Ioseliani, Robert Altman
and others. In short, a memorable cinema journey once again awaits
us in Istanbul between 15 and 30 April this year. Having leapt out
of the path, not of the Lumieres' train, but the tram along Istiklal
Caddesi, and thrown ourselves into a cinema seat, we can let the
films carry us away. •
* Necati Sönmez is a journalist
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