Opening as every year in Ankara, the Festival on Wheels treated residents of the capital to a film-packed week from 30th November to 6th December. This included film screenings to full theatres, workshops, panel discussions and open audience meetings with leading names from Turkish cinema.
The Festival on Wheels then set its course for Black Sea shores, taking off for the second time to Sinop. Screenings here began on 7th December and finished on the 10th, marking the end of the Festival’s 2012 expedition. This year’s Ankara screenings drew record audience numbers with theatres reaching capacity levels of 96 per cent, while tickets for some screenings sold out days in advance. A total of 65 films were shown during the Festival, which also saw large turnouts at audience Q&A sessions with filmmakers. During Turkey 2012 and Short is Good screenings in particular, some audience members found themselves having to perch in the aisles.
The Turkey 2012 section of this year’s Festival on Wheels featured Somewhere in Between (Yeşim Ustaoğlu), Voice of My Father (Orhan Eskiköy, Zeynel Doğan), Cycle (Derviş Zaim), Mold (Ali Aydın), Night of Silence (Reis Çelik), Know My Name (İnan Temelkuran, Kristen Stevens), Present Tense (Belmin Söylemez), Inside (Zeki Demirkubuz) and The Particle (Erdem Tepegöz).
As a one-off this year, the Festival on Wheels programme included The Films Tuncel Kurtiz Watches ‘Encore Encore’, a section comprising five classics from European and American cinema. Before the first screening of each title, the versatile veteran of Turkish cinema told audiences why he watched the film over and over and, in some cases, sat down for another viewing with festival-goers. The tantalizing line-up included: Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, the Robert Altman classic, Nashville; Luchino Visconti’s Palme d’Or winner, The Leopard; Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion; and the Alain Tanner directed Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. Kurtiz openly declared himself a fan of the Festival on Wheels for “presenting the kind of films that no one else dared show for the last 17 years”.
Among the Festival guests were German director Peter Ohlendorf, who made Blood Must Flow – Undercover Among Nazis, an arresting documentary about the rise of neo-Nazi culture in Europe, and Israeli documentary director-producer Yoram Schaffer, who ran the two-day New Media Documentary Workshop, along with Udi Ben-Arie of the Tel Aviv University Film and Television Department. In the Stop Motion Animation Workshop led by Jenny van den Broeke and Mieke Driessen in Ankara, young filmmakers had the chance to make their very first films.
In World Cinema, the Festival on Wheels presented audiences with a selection of films from all over the globe, spanning countries from Chile to South Korea and Austria to Serbia. Turkish premieres ofThe King of Pigs (Sang-Ho Yeun), The Year of the Tiger (Sebastian Lelio), The Parade (Srdjan Dragojevic), Here and There (Antonio Mendez Esparza), Thursday Till Sunday (Domingo Sotomayor)and The Cleaner (Adrian Saba) were all held at the Festival on Wheels. Other films in the section included Love (Michael Haneke), Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin) and No (Pablo Larrain).
Beyond Enchantment: The Work of Larry Jordan offered Festival audiences a line-up of one feature-length and eight short films by pioneer of animation and experimental cinema, American filmmaker Larry Jordan. The section was presented by film curator Kitty Aal.
In Children’s Films: The Netherlands, the Festival on Wheels introduced younger audiences to a pick of animation films by the two Dutch directors, Frodo Kuipers and Arjan Wilschut. Meanwhile, the Short is Good section brought Festival audiences the best of over 1000 short films submitted to the Festival from countries around the world.
Carmen Losmann’s first feature-length documentary, Work Hard Play Hard, Russian director Andrey Gryazev’s documentary, Tomorrow, and two documentary shorts made up the Manufacturing Defect section, which addressed corporate life, production systems, the police, authority and, more generally, the status of western civilization in the 21st century.
Festival notices, the programme, films and events can be followed on the Festival on Wheels web site, Facebook page and Twitter account. Photographs can be downloaded from Flickr and trailers watched on Vimeo.
