October 1, 2006

Getting ‘Out there on the Edge’: Reflections on the first Turkish Film Festival in Australia and Contemporary Cinematic Revival

A film festival weaves a narrative. Through their programming national film festivals tell a story about a country at a particular time. When we organised the first Turkish film festival in Australia in 1998, we deliberately set out to challenge and educate an Australian audience that had outdated notions of a country in rapid transition. We also hoped to counter prevailing perceptions of the approximately 150 000-strong Turkish diaspora for whom Turkish film production was still perceived as second-rate or irrelevant. The following paper is a reflection on the promotion and reception of the Turkish film festival in light of Turkey’s cinematic revival, underway since the landmark film Eskiya released in 1997.

In many cases festivals are vehicles for an official projection of the nation state organised by an arm of the respective government, be that the Goethe Institute, the British Council, the Japan Foundation, the Australian Film Commission or Alliance Française etc. However this has been rare in Turkey’s case. Promoting culture and art abroad is something quite recent for the Turkish government. Before the cultural revival of the last few years, Turkey had a weak and corrupt civil government that seemed to lurch from one crisis to the next and often sought to censor aspects of the society both culturally and politically. On the international political stage, Turkish nationhood was contested primarily due to the war raging in the Kurdish-dominated south-east and the issue of Turkish Cyprus.

Despite the lack of government support, the revival of, and interest in, Turkish filmmaking has seen an exponential increase in the number of Turkish film festivals held outside of Turkey since the late 1990s. In most cases these festivals are independently organised by individuals or organizations stepping into the vacuum left by a weak civil state. It was into this vacuum that we stepped in 1997.

The first Turkish film festival in Australia (October-November 1998) was a reciprocal event to the first Australian Film festival held in Istanbul in October 1994.(2) Both film festivals were independently organised by Bruce Jeffreys and myself and funded through a combination of support from the Australian government and private sponsorship from a number of corporations including international airlines and transport companies.(3) The Turkish film festival in Australia was a four-day festival that toured three of Australia’s biggest cities — Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. Total audience numbers were over 4000. We endeavoured to make both festivals cross-cultural events and therefore accessible to the cinema-going public of both countries as well as the local communities from that language group. This was achieved through careful selection of the location of the events and the subtitling of the films in both English/Turkish. In Australia, especially in Melbourne and Sydney where there are significant numbers of Turkish migrants, we could have located the festival close to where the diaspora is concentrated. However in both cases these areas are quite a distance from the city centres, so in terms of accessibility for non-Turkish Australians we deliberately chose venues that were within the ‘neutral zone’ of the inner-city. This was intended to avoid defining the festival as solely a Turkish community event.

Problematizing Festival Promotion
In publicising an event such as the Turkish Film festival, one of the obvious starting points is the need to construct and utilise the term ‘Turkish cinema’ in a way that is meaningful for a country such as Australia. Scarce information circulates about Turkey in the Australian media milieu beyond mere touristic images of ancient ruins and eastern exotica, or the ‘noble Turk’ of Gallipoli; the famous World War One battle in which many Australians perished.(4) For Turkish Australians perceptions of film production could be encapsulated by the insult, ‘like a Turkish film’; a saying implying the excessive melodrama and bad taste of an earlier era of Turkish cinema.

One of Turkish cinema’s fundamental problems, a problem plaguing many national cinemas, is that it is not perceived as a niche cinema, unlike the French, Italian or Iranian national cinemas, which have all developed their own particular markets in opposition to Hollywood. But like these cinemas Turkish cinema can create a sense of difference through its language and culture. However trying to capitalise on this sense of difference for promotional purposes poses another issue; how is it done without reducing projections of the nation to mere tourist images?

A related issue is the messiness of the term ‘Turkish cinema’.(5) For instance, how accurate is this term for a group of films that have their origins not only in Turkey. Could we have labelled it a European film festival given that four of the seven films were actually co-productions (Karisik Pizza — France; Eskiya, Agir Roman and Akrebin Yolculugu— Euroimages; Usta Beni Oldursense — Hungary, Germany and UK). Still these were co-productions in predominantly financial terms rather than in content or story material. Another question is: how representative of the whole of Turkey are these films given that five out of the seven were set in Istanbul?

We thought it was important to make a break from the stereotypes and tourist-brochure clichéd images that would reduce Turkey to a place of exotic oriental mysticism, minarets, blue mosques and endless beaches. But then we faced the problem of finding a suitably sophisticated image to exploit for the purposes of promotion. In the early days of the festival organization we used the crescent moon. But that image became immediately problematized because for some Turks it signifies an archaic Ottoman past that embodies nothing relating to modern-day Turkey. We were also sensitive to the crescent moon’s links to Islam within the current climate of Islamic fundamentalism. After consulting many Turkish Australians it became evident that whatever image we used would be problematic.

The graphic we eventually selected for the promotional poster came from the film Karisik Pizza with the following slogan, ‘“Get out there on the Edge”- For the first time in Australia, a festival of films leading the Turkish cinema revival’. The slide graphic depicting a scene from the film was then rendered to make it appear like a video image. Our intention was to generate curiosity and interest while not exploiting the obvious elements of exotica. We wanted to create an impression that Turkey’s was a dynamic, rapidly growing film industry where something is happening – a revival akin to Iran’s of the late 80s and early 90s perhaps. We were also trying to allude to Turkey’s unique position on the edge of two continents enabling its culture to embody a European-Asian synergy.

To increase the awareness that this was a festival catering to a huge cross-section of tastes, we marketed the films individually through the brochure, the website and the little media attention we received. For example, for those who desired an exotic, Ottoman extravaganza, Istanbul Kanatlarimin Altinda was suitable; while for those who craved the minimalism redolent of Mohsen Makhmalbaf or Kiarostami, Kasaba would be an obvious choice. A sense of philosophical Eastern mysticism could be found in viewing Akrebin Yolculugu, whereas for lovers of action-thrillers, Karisik Pizza would appeal.

The Question of Media and Audience:
The Turkish media response to the Australian festival in Istanbul in 1994 had been overwhelming, to the extent that journalists were often chasing us for a story. This is evidently a result of having far greater competition between newspapers and reflects the extraordinarily dynamic media environment, which exists in Turkey. In Australia however the mainstream media was so difficult to penetrate that we were often left wondering what we had done wrong.

Reflecting back on this experience what we witnessed first hand we believe was the (negative) operation of ‘multiculturalism’, a policy that has been employed on and off in Australia since the early 1970s by both conservative and Labor governments alike. Under this policy, specific funding has been available to develop an ethnic media sector through the direct funding of organizations such as the national Special Broadcasting Corporation (SBS). This station was unique in the world and broadcasts in over 40 languages per week. Another example of multiculturalism as a policy can be seen at work in the granting of free radio licences to community-based radio stations that broadcast in languages other than English. The process of creating a separate virtual space within which different cultural events can exist and be promoted for the benefit of a particular ethnic group leaves mainstream Australian society virtually untouched by these other cultures and as a result easily marginalised. This was the case with our festival. In so-called multicultural Australia, a Turkish film festival was worthy of support but only as an ethnic community event that did not cross over into mainstream (Anglo-Celtic dominated) Australia. The event was effectively constrained by the media as being ‘too ethnic’. Generally this attitude is implicit but on one occasion it became explicit. In trying to secure a radio interview or just some airtime with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC (our equivalent to the UK’s BBC), a producer explained to us that there was little interest in the festival because it was ‘too ethnic’ and not mainstream enough. The only media which existed for the festival was the SBS or Turkish community radio programmes; mainstream organizations such as the ABC were then free to get on with representing mainstream culture. For them it seemed that to be a migrant from a non-English speaking diaspora was a private matter and not part of the public sphere. Perhaps this is what happens when you lack the kind of media diversity that exists in Turkey; events like this become easily marginalised.

The Turkish diaspora and Eskiya:
A film festival, if it is to be successful, needs to reflect and cater to the diverse agendas of the local diaspora. Despite being relatively small, the Turkish diaspora in Australia is fragmented. It is comprised of unskilled factory workers who emigrated in the late 1960s and early 70s, educated skilled migrants in the 1980s, asylum seekers, second-generation Turks who may be more allied to Australia than the homeland and more recently students. The different political allegiances (the socialists, the nationalists, Islamists and the Ataturk secularists) are amplified in the diasporic setting and also through Australia’s ‘tyranny of distance’.(6)The challenge of the film festival was to bring all these people together and this was achieved through the film Eskiya.

Eskiya has become a landmark film in the current revival of Turkish cinema and it was indeed the inspiration for our festival. Without this film the festival would not have been worth running because the arthouse films would not have generated the audience numbers needed to make the festival break even. The mass appeal of Eskiya in Turkey can be shown through the fact that at the time of its release it broke all box office records and brought audiences back to Turkish cinema.

The film depicts a Kurdish outlaw being released after decades in jail. He returns to his village in the mountains of the southeast only to find it under water after being dammed. Eskiya (‘the bandit’) then journeys to Istanbul to seek revenge on the man who betrayed him and stole his childhood sweetheart. In terms of narrative, themes and characterization, Eskiya is heavily influenced by an earlier period Turkish cinema, Yesilcam.(7) From its opening scenes of his village under water to Eskiya’s alienation in the big cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, the film is imbued with a deep sense of nostalgia and longing for a country that once was. Eskiya is also a story of migration from village to city and shows the bandit’s alienation in Istanbul; a notion that perhaps resonates for a group of migrants whose commonality is the act of migration. Eskiya therefore performs an ambivalent function. While at one level appealing to a sense of alienation that migrants may feel in a new land, it also simultaneously reaffirms the act of migration; showing a Turkey that has been irrevocably changed for the worse by the forces of globalisation and neo-liberalisation. In this way films in diasporic communities can weave slightly different narratives about the homeland than when viewed in their domestic environment and they may reinforce why the migrant left or alternatively hasten them to return ‘home’.

From Cultural paralysis to cultural Revival
The cultural paralysis evident throughout the 1980s and early 1990s is a far cry from the contemporary cultural revival that has swept Turkey and is particularly noticeable in its largest city. “Istanbul is one of the coolest cities in the world”, proclaimed the cover story of Newsweek’s European edition in August 2005. The Istanbul Biennale (September-October 2005) was further evidence of this dynamic, growing metropolis’ emerging artistic self-confidence.

In opposition to most countries’ filmmaking cultures that have suffered from globalization and neo-liberalism, Turkey’s seems to be thriving both commercially and artistically. This is occurring in parallel with alternative voices providing a counter to Turkey’s “hackneyed nationalist discourses".(8) In the past, those aspects deemed both antithetical and a threat to the integrity of the Turkish nation-state – free artistic expression of cultural and ethnic diversity, a developing transnationalism and a public re-imagining of (traumatic) historical events, combined with an open, dynamic media sector – now constitute the primary strengths of filmmaking in Turkey.(9)

Domestically, the extraordinary resurgence in commercial film production over the last few years makes Turkish cinema a serious contender to Hollywood’s market dominance. Turkish films took 38 percent and 41 percent of their domestic box office in 2004 and 2005 respectively.(10) In the first quarter of 2006, Turkish films occupied five of the top-10 slots at the local box office.(11) Turkish film production has grown steadily since the mid-1990s, with 27 feature films released locally in 2005, up from 18 in 2004 and 16 in 2003. In 2004 G.O.R.A. achieved an all-time box-office record in Turkey of more than 4 million viewers (US$18.3m). This was eclipsed in 2006 by the anti-Iraq war film Kurtlar Vadisi – Iraq (Valley of the Wolves — Iraq) which made US$20 million.

Turkey’s artistic renaissance and emergence on the broader European cultural stage has been acknowledged through numerous prestigious awards won in recent years. In 2003, Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Golden Palm Award for his film Uzak (Distant, 2002). In that same year, Turkey (Sertab Erener) won the Eurovision Song Contest and, in 2004, Orhan Pamuk’s novel, My Name is Red, received great critical acclaim after winning the one of the world’s richest literature awards: Ireland’s IMPAC Dublin award. Meanwhile high-profile director Fatih Akin, who often exploits his Turkish migrant background and Istanbul as a setting in his films, became the first German director in 20 years to win the Berlin Film Festival in 2004 with his film, Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004). Head-On has recently gone on to win the 2006 Best Foreign Language Film award at the National Society of Film Critics in the United States. While this film is transnational in setting, moving between Hamburg and Istanbul, in terms of funding and origin there is no doubt it is German. However, through the exposure that Head-On, and his latest documentary, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005), have received, Akin has evidently put Istanbul and Turkey on the celluloid map.

The Turkish government is now making strategic attempts to fund and promote broader film culture. One way has been through the mounting of the new Eurasian Film Festival and Market, beside its 42-year-old Golden Orange counterpart in the Eastern Mediterranean city of Antalya. One of the new festival’s aims was to forge alliances between Turkish and foreign film producers and inspire future co-production activity. The Ministry of Culture has also established a new film fund targeted at producing primarily arthouse films that may garner prizes for Turkey at international festivals. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates (in competition at Cannes in 2006) was one of the films to benefit from the new funding. It was his award-winning Uzak (Distant) screened at more than 100 festivals around the world that convinced the Ministry to set up the fund.

This filmmaking resurgence has made the urgency of film festivals like the one we organized in 1998 now virtually redundant. Crowd-pleasers like Hababam Sinifi, GORA, Kurtlar Vadisi can be regularly viewed at a multiplex cinema in the western suburbs of Melbourne or Sydney, close to where the Turkish diaspora is located. However only occasionally do the prints come with English subtitles and one has to be part of the local community or access the Turkish-language press to know that they are on thus making them virtually inaccessible to non-Turkish Australians. These commercial Turkish films that bring in big audiences, while providing a counter to Hollywood domestically, will never become a part of mainstream Australian cinema-going. On the other side of the spectrum, arthouse films like Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates, Yesim Ustaoglu’s Beneath Clouds and Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge occasionally get a look-in at the big film festivals in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. In August this year the Brisbane International Film Festival had a special section devoted to women in Turkish and Iranian cinema. While Turkish cinema will never have the kind of niche market that is maintained by French cinema in Australia, it is no longer ‘out there on the edge’.

Catherine Simpson is lecturer in film at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has organised film festivals in Australia and Turkey and writes on the cinema of both countries.

1. Sections of this article have been previously published under the title: “Turkish Delights: Reflections on the Promotion and Reception of the first Turkish Film festival in Australia”, in Metro Magazine, 2000 No. 124/125 p. 60-63
2. See Catherine Simpson, ‘“_stanbul’da her _ey olabilir” or “Anything’s possible in Istanbul”’ for a detailed analysis of the staging of this event;
http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/film/Istanbul.html
3. The main sponsor for the Turkish film festival in Australia was Cathay Pacific.
4. Many Australians lost their lives when the ANZAC and Allied forces invaded Turkey. Despite this there is an on-going friendship on the basis that Australians were victims of the British incompetence and sacrificed while invading a foreign land.
5. See Tom O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London, p. 77.
6. Unlike Germany’s Turkish community, Australia’s remoteness to Turkey makes it more difficult for the community to maintain links with the homeland and access regular news and information. While satellite TV has changed this situation in the last few years, it still remains an issue. It is also expensive to travel between the two countries.
7. In the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, Istanbul was home to the prolific Yesilcam, the popular feature film industry which, at its height in 1968-74, pumped out 250-300 films per year, making it the third largest film industry in the world. Yesilcam (literally “green pine”) denotes a particular system of production-distribution-exhibition and takes its name from a street in the area of Beyoglu, Istanbul, where most of the production houses were located.
8. Asuman Suner, “Horror of a Different Kind: Dissonant Voices in the New Turkish Cinema”, Screen, Vol. 45, No. 4, Winter 2004, p. 305
9. See: Catherine Simpson“Turkish cinema’s resurgence: the deep nation unravels” in Senses of Cinema, vol 39, 2006 http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/39/turkish_cinema.html
10. Anna Franklin, “Local Pix boffo in Turkey”, Variety, 25 April 25 – 1 2005, p. 12
11. Anna Franklin, “Turks delight in local B.O. uptick”
May 1, 2006;
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117942244?categoryid=13&cs=1