Antalya Film Forum Winners 2017
For the fourth time the Antalya Film Forum took place. I was here last year as well and can say that the always smiling and positive Zeynep Atakan and her young female team has established an event that has grown and is run with professional generosity.
The documentary has found a place at the Forum – it is still a little brother but one that is taken care of and recognised. The six selected projects were all interesting one way or the other and I had the privilege to get to know the people behind the films to be. Through training and meetings.
The two jurors Sevdije Kastrati from Kosovo and Dennis Wheatley
from the UK chose the two winners, who both of them will get a development grant of 8000$. Not bad!
On the photo you see Kastrati handing over the award to Tayfur Aydin for his ”12 Years Later…”. The film is a kind of ”7UP” story. In the clip Aydin showed, kids, all Kurdish, attend a summer camp in 2007 and express what they want to be when they grow up. The location of the camp is in South-East of Turkey, in the region Batman close to the Syrian border. Some of the kids, now around 20 years of age have been to war. The place of the camp is today a ruin. The director wants to find some of the kids to see where they are in their lives. Did some of their dreams come through?
Also awarded was the charming ”Mimaroglu” to be directed by Serdar Kökceoglu with Dilek Aydin as one of the producers. Dilek Aydin was involved in two other projects that were awarded. She is one of those natural born pitchers, who can sell sand in Sahara! The project is a love story about Ilhan and Güngōr Mimaroglu, he being a man who developed the electronic music scene, she being politically active and several times emprisoned for her taking part in demonstrations in New York, where they lived. He became famous when he made music for Fellini’s ”Satyricon”.
There were two fine projects dealing with Cyprus. One, to be directed by Sevinc Baloglu with her daughter Su as the producer and one of the characters in a film, that has three other women taking part, two photographers and the 99 year old woman, who lives in the middle zone, also called the buffer zone. The other Cyprus film-to-be is ”Beats-N-Pieces” by Ekin Calisir, targeting a young audience, again a film about the absurd situation on the island, that has been divided since 1974.
Experienced film couple Orhan (the director) and Nurdan Tekeoglu (producer) took part with a film with a moving story, ”Time to Leave” about a father, whose son – living in Germany – turned ill and wanted to come back and live with the father in a cottage in a mountain area. The father prepares his return, but the son dies and the father regrets that he had no contact with the son, when he was in prison because of drugs.
Finally Alp Kamber presented ”The Quest”, which has 58 year old Yusuf, psychologist, as the main character. He was born in Kashmir, but left for Istanbul with his father; the mother stayed in the war zone. Yusuf has no idea if his mother is alive or dead. One day a phone call from the Indian embassy in Istanbul tells him that his mother might be alive. He decides to go to Kashmir to look for her, the film crew comes along.
