Film takes a haunting look at arranged marriages

‘Lal Gece’ (Night of Silence), director and writer Reis Çelik’s Crystal Bear winner in this year’s Berlinale, hits theaters this week. Most of the story taking place in the bridal chamber, the film is a haunting look at arranged marriages in Turkey. ‘Lal Gece’ is a one of many in a string of Turkish films on arranged marriages

A young adolescent girl locked in a room to have sex against her will with a much older man would be the definition of rape in many countries. Yet in some parts of rural Turkey it is merely standard procedure for a traditional arranged marriage.

Reis Çelik’s latest feature and Crystal Bear winner in this year’s Berlin International Film Festival Lal Gece (Night of Silence) follows a traditional arranged wedding in which the 60-something-year old groom is sent off to the bridal chamber with his 14-year-old bride to consummate the marriage by sunrise the next day.

The marriage is an arrangement to end the blood feud between two families and the groom, played by veteran actor İlyas Salman, has spent most of his life in prison for the murder, done as an honor killing, of his mother. The film’s director and writer Çelik layers in a look at another patriarchal tradition accepted in certain rural parts of Turkey with the addition of the groom’s honor killing to the plot. The young bride, played by newcomer Dilan Aksüt, is a fresh-faced teenager under her bright red wedding veil.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)

Acclaimed filmmaker Kutluğ Ataman funds next film via web

Acclaimed filmmaker and contemporary artist Kutluğ Ataman may have advanced to the next stage in arts funding for his new film, ‘South Facing Wall’: crowd funding

When South Facing Wall, the fifth feature film by globally recognized Turkish filmmaker and contemporary artist Kutluğ Ataman, hits the theaters some time next year, there will be at least 153 individual funders proudly watching the film, some who have contributed 2,000 dollars, others merely two dollars.

Ataman has chosen Kickstarter, the U.S. crowd funding website for creative projects, as a major source for his upcoming movie, which will be filmed in the eastern province of Erzincan. The contributions from individual film aficionados will go directly to funding development and pre-production, help the production team shape the project from rewriting and research and include other aspects like location scouting and production design.

When you check the Kickstarter page for the project, you won’t see much on the filming details, nor about the cast and the crew. What you will see is a detailed account of the film, the story, and how the funding will work, including a five-minute video of Ataman himself talking about what he wants to achieve with his film.

“I want to make a film that talks about the everyday lives of individuals who live here and have not found proper representation in Turkish cinema,” Ataman says in the video to the potential (and hopefully actual) funders, referring to the people of eastern Anatolia.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)

Karaoğlan, Turkish comic book hero returns to screen

Karaoğlan, the famous comic book hero of the 1960s, makes a comeback in the upcoming film, directed by Kudret Sabancı. The young Turkic warrior will once again fight his archenemy, Mongol leader Camoka, in the film to be released next January

Nationalist sentiments continue their invasion of Turkish pop culture as another Turkish hero saves Anatolia, this time from the Mongols. With some blatant and crude nationalism in recent Turkish cinema like the box office hit Fetih 1453 (Conquest 1453) and the action series Kurtlar Vadisi (The Valley of the Wolves), the news of the upcoming adventures of a Turkish hero on screen stirred quite some excitement last week.

Karaoğlan, veteran cartoonist Suat Yalaz’s beloved comic book hero, is getting ready for his screen comeback, riding his horse in the vast film set in Kemerburgaz in northern Istanbul. The hero is a young Turkic adventurer in his early 20s, and the literal translation of his name is the Swarthy Boy, referring to his trademark dark locks. The setting is 12th- and 13th-century Central Asia during the reign of Genghis Khan.

Karaoğlan was one of the most popular Turkish comic book heroes of the 1960s, dubbed the Heroes with Swords, all of them inspired by motifs from the histories and folklore of Turks, as well as Islam. The historic comic book heroes proved to be the darling of pop culture at the time, with more than 50 heroes hitting the stands at one time.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)

Death by technology in film

Two new releases this week demonstrate the changing face of fear of technology in movies. While an ATM booth, mobile phones and cameras betray humans in one horror flick, in another a power outage becomes the ultimate source of horror. Here’s a look at technophobia in movies, which goes as far back as the early 1920s

Forwarding a private email to your boss could be the ultimate horror story. You might also harbor anxiety over someone tagging you on Facebook. Online shopping can be as scary, if you’ve heard stories of people’s credit cards being hacked. In fact, sometimes computers and emails, TV sets and credit cards can be much scarier than haunted houses, monstrous sharks, and psycho killers – at least on screen.

Two of this week’s new releases play on our anxieties about changing technology and our dependence on it. In director David Brooks’s ATM, three friends stop by an ATM booth to withdraw some cash, only to find themselves trapped in the ATM and their lives threatened by a hooded man waiting to kill them. While technology becomes a threat to their lives, it is also technology that offers them the chance of escape, in the form of mobile phones and cameras – which perhaps also let them down, fuelling even more fear of technology.

In Alexandre Courtès’ The Incident (released with the title Asylum Blackout in some countries), a group of unsuspecting people are stuck in a prison-like building with the criminally insane when a thunderstorm causes a blackout. Something as simple as a malfunction in electricity becomes the source of true horror in this French-American horror movie.

The fear of technology and its reflection in art, more specifically in fiction, is as old as, well, technology.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)

Book links identities to pop music

Turkey’s conflicting dynamics between state ideology and pop culture are analyzed in a book titled ‘The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music,’ written by music scholar Martin Stokes. The book is now in Turkish

The way to explore a nation’s identity is through a country’s music, its singers and the intimate connection they establish with their fans, advocates Martin Stokes, a lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Oxford University and the writer of The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music.

Stokes is a renowned academic studying music and music theory with a particular emphasis on contemporary Middle East. He is no stranger to examining Turkish music as his first book The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey was published in early 1990s.

Stokes’ second book, The Republic of Love has recently been translated into Turkish by Koç University Press. The book dissects Turkey’s recent history and its conflicting national identities through three musicians. Zeki Müren, the flamboyant singer who single-handedly normalized the concept of queer in Turkish culture, Orhan Gencebay, the father of arabesk music, and Sezen Aksu, the diva and queen of Turkish pop music, stand at the core of Stokes’ book. Through these public figures, Stokes visits Turkey’s history from the 1950s to today, and questions alternative conceptions of Turkishness as opposed to identities imposed by state ideologies. The music and public personae of these three figures help shine a light on the history of Turkish politics, a constant source of civil unrest. Stokes looks at music and pop culture in general as a major player in cultural change and as a reflection on turmoil.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)

Portrayal of transgenders in Turkish films, or lack thereof

This week marked Pride Week for LGBT communities. Turkey might be more accepting and tolerant of the first three letters of the LGBT communities, but when it comes to transgender people, not so much

Thousands marched yesterday in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, proudly waving the rainbow flag as they brought an end to a month of pride. June is the month when we see pictures adorned with the colors of the rainbow and even more colorful LGBT communities walking together across the world to celebrate pride.

The idea behind the celebration of pride is to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots that kick-started the gay rights movement in the United States, and more so, remind the status quo that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities demand an end to ostracization and equal rights.

While we’re used to seeing pictures from Western countries of over-the-top celebrations of pride, carefully picked by the media to marginalize the events, Turkey itself is not new to Pride Week, which concludes with the Pride Parade.

The very first Pride Week was organized in 1993 when various panels and events took place behind close doors because the Istanbul Governor’s Office had denied permission for more high-profile activities. It wasn’t until a decade later that Pride Week would close with a parade that was attended by a mere 30 people. The number increased exponentially each year, with around 10,000 people gathering and marching against homophobia and transphobia last year. But to the mainstream media, it’s still a marginal event that does not have much news value.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)

Orientalist look from Hollywood

Previous attempts by the Culture and Tourism Ministry to lure foreign film productions to Turkey may have created a bias, producing a history of films depicting Turks, Turkey and Istanbul through an Orientalist perspective for half a century

“It is evident that cinema makes a big contribution to tourism,” Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay said in a June 13 meeting at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University, which brought together representatives from the Ministry and the Turkish cinema sector.

The meeting was convened to kick-start work on the new Turkish cinema draft law, the first seen since 2004. Set to be included in the new draft law will the establishment of a platform to provide support to foreign films shot in Turkey. Günay said, “We already do our best [to support] such productions, but we think that it would be easier to appear in the world market if we collaborate with a foreign film company.”

Günay has in fact been flirting with a system to increase foreign film productions in Turkey for some time now. Building sets and stages devoted to foreign film productions is one of the projects he has proposed. An incentive system is another.

Last year, he met with producers of the upcoming James Bond movie Skyfall, to make known his enthusiasm to have many of the film’s scenes filmed in Turkey. The production team, including current James Bond actor, Daniel Craig, were in Turkey earlier this year to film scenes at Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square, Hagia Sophia, the coastal town of Fethiye, and the historic Varda Railway Bridge close to the southern city of Adana.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)

Vampirler: Gecenin 'öteki' sesinden çoksesliliğe

Hayatınıza giren ilk vampiri hatırlıyor musunuz? Hangi sinema karesinden ya da hangi kitabın sayfalarından ölümcül dişlerini ilk kez gösterdiğini? Ben hatırlamıyorum. Edebiyat, sinema, çizgi roman ve televizyondan sürekli karşıma çıkan vampir tiplemesinin beni korkutmak, tedirgin etmek, kimi durumda midemi bulandırmak üzere yaratılmış olduğunu biliyorum yalnızca. Hayatıma giren ilk vampirleri hatırlamaya çalıştığımda, aklıma F. W. Murnau’nun yüzyıl başında çektiği Nosferatu filmindeki fareden hallice Kont Orlok ve çeşitlemeleri geliyor.

Vampirlerin ne zaman yeraltından yükseldiklerini, ne zaman geceyi sahiplenen, tanımlar ötesi, tanrısal yaratıklara dönüştüklerini ise çok iyi hatırlıyorum. Anne Rice’ın yüzyıllık acılarıyla büyüyen, ölüme ve yaşama lanet etmekten keyif duyan, baştan çıkarıcı vampirleriyle tanıştığım zaman.

O zamana kadar ne düşünür, ne hisseder merak etmediğim, yalnızca kimi içer, kimi yer ilgi duyduğum vampirler Anne Rice’ın kalemi, Roza Hakmen’in çevirisiyle Interview with the Vampire/Vampirle Görüşme romanında dünyanın en ilgi çekici yaratıklarına dönüştüler. Louis’nin ağzından dökülen hüzünlü sözcükler, Lestat’ın insanı anında içine çeken karizması ve Claudia’nın çocuk-kadın karmaşasıyla vampirlerin içine yeniden, bu sefer farklı bir heyecanla düşüverdim.

Vampirler kendi öykülerini anlatmaya, birer özne olmaya başladıkça herkesin benzer bir dönüşümü yaşadığını düşünüyorum. Kimisi için Underworld serisi bu görevi gördü, kimisi The Lost Boys filminin serseri vampir çetesiyle vampirleri çekici bulmaya başladı.

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London 2012: What's in it for the locals?

Come 9 September, London will have closed its curtains both for the Olympic and the Paralympic Games. But what has it meant for those living around the area where the Olympic Park was built, and most importantly, what will it mean in the aftermath of the Games?

We have seen London write history in the modern Olympics as it became the first city to have hosted the Games three times, previously in 1908 and 1948, the second time after a long pause in the Olympics in the aftermath of the World War II. The iconic sporting event, coupled with the Cultural Olympiad that is the London 2012 Festival, has put its mark on 2012 as the biggest global event of this year.

But perhaps, the real impact of the Games for the British, more specifically the Londoners, will have to bear the test of time. Whether Prime Minister’s aspiration for the Olympic legacy will come true: “Make sure the Olympics legacy lifts East London from being one of the poorest parts of the country to one that shares fully in the capital’s growth and prosperity.”

Seven years ago last month, London was announced as the host of the 2012 Summer Olympics, beating Paris in a close race. The celebrations might have been cut short in the 7/7 bombings the next day, but one of the UK’s biggest redevelopment and regeneration projects began full swing.

Along with hosting the greatest sporting event of modern history, the UK conceived the Olympic Games as an opportunity to bring East London out of its notorious economic deprivation, the 11th poorest area in the UK. Money has been pouring into the East London borough of Newham, where the Olympic Park was built over a land between Hackney Wick and Stratford, as well as the boroughs that border the Park, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Greenwich and Waltham Forest.

Click here for full article (British Council Turkey Blog)

Controversy starts early at Golden Oranges

As is the custom with Turkey’s biggest cinema event, the Golden Orange Film Festival, controversy around the national competition has begun taking the media by storm. This time, the contention has started early

What’s Turkey’s biggest cinema event, the Golden Orange Film Festival, without the anticipated controversy? There might be two months left until the festival kicks off in October, but the heat came early this year with the announcement of the jury for the national competition last week.

Cinema, competition and controversy have been running hand in hand in the southern province of Antalya almost every autumn for half a century now. The biggest cinema event in Turkey has been mocked and praised and courted and shunned for varying reasons throughout the course of its history.

But the true controversy has always centered on the national competition. Since the early days of the festival, the category has been much more than a competition. The selection of the films, the selection of the jury and the handing out of the awards, together with their aftermath, have always managed to steal the headlines away from any celebration of cinema.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)

London 2012: A celebration of history and an ode to a changing world

It was a proud fortnight for Britain and for London, showing to the world that the Olympic Games is much more than sports and competition. London 2012 Summer Olympics was a celebration of diversity, equality, team spirit, fair play, and Western Civilisation when at its best. It was the Games that wrote history in many respects, most memorable perhaps for women athletes.

“Didn’t we do well!” screamed the front page headline of the UK’s Daily Express the day after the Closing Ceremony of London 2012 Summer Olympics. “The Games brought out much that is best in this country,” wrote The Guardian. “They allowed us a golden glimpse of a nation that celebrates men and women with equal awe, and embraces British athletes of all racial backgrounds,” continued the story.

The London 2012 Summer Olympics was an ode to the Olympic spirit, to fair play, to a changing world, and to a changing Britain. It brought together athletes young enough to care equally for Justin Bieber and a gold medal, andold enough to remember the tragic 1972 Munich Olympics. It brought together countries that filled a whole apartment in the Olympic village, with those that had no country to compete for. It brought people of all race, all religion, andall colour.

London 2012 showed to the world that the iconic sporting event is a team effort, continually acknowledging the colossal contribution of the 70 thousand volunteers throughout the Games. It was a historic Games in many respects. It was the Games where women shined equally with men, some of them representing their countries for the first time in their history. It was the “first social media Olympics,” as put by the International Olympic Committee. 150 million Tweets were sent during the Games, Usain Bolt breaking another record with his 1.3 million followers.

Click here for full article (British Council Blog)

Turkish films shine in Venice line-up

Absent at the Venice International Film Fest for two decades, Turkish cinema has become a regular fixture in the festival over the last four years. This year’s line up includes three movies from Turkish filmmakers Here’s a look at the journey of Turkish cinema in Venice over the past four years

With less than a month before the 69th Venice International Film Festival kicks off, the line-up has been announced, surprising moviegoers with only a few of the expected overlaps with the Toronto Film Festival. The festival will open with The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mira Nair, one of the 20 female directors who are going to be debuting their work this year.

The list of films to be screened at the festival came as good news for Turkey, with internationally-acclaimed female director Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s Araf (Somewhere in Between) included into the Orrizonti (Horizons) section, and director Ali Aydın’s debut feature Küf (Mold) competing for the Lion of the Future award, an award won two years ago by another Turkish director’s debut feature, Seren Yüce’s Çoğunluk (Majority).

The inclusion of the two films in the line-up made headlines last weekend, but there was another success story by two other Turkish filmmakers. One of the films to be screened in the Giornate degli Autori (Venice Days) section of the festival is Inheritance, a joint production between Israel, France and Turkey. The film is the directorial debut of Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, renowned for her roles in such films as Satin Rouge, Dawn of the World, and Amreeka. The two Turkish names from among the producers are Faruk Özerten and Ender Sevim. Özerten has channeled his skills to producing after having worked in the U.S. as an assistant director and a producer for one of the episodes of the short-lived TV series Missing, starring Ashley Judd.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)