“In its 18th year, Festival on Wheels is still a force to be reckoned with. Its humbleness continues to be coupled with its tireless fight against the system,” the famous film critic Alin Taşçıyan recently wrote. “Wherever the festival travels to, it takes pleasure in becoming part of that city, creating a new audience in each city.”
Beginning its 18th journey Nov. 30, the Festival on Wheels is much more than your regular film festival. It has been the place where generation after generation in distant parts of Turkey have had the magical chance to watch their first film on screen, it has helped cities open their very first movie theaters and provided the public with the chance to interact with filmmakers themselves.
The festival first hit the road in the winter of 1995, kicking off in Ankara then heading to İstanbul, İzmir and Eskişehir for a month. During its 17-year run, Festival on Wheels shared the love of cinema with 19 cities from Sinop in the north to İzmir in the west and the eastern city of Kars, even visiting some neighboring countries like Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Greece.
“By the festival’s 13th year, we had made one tour around the globe,” said Ahmet Boyacıoğlu, General Secretary of the Ankara Cinema Association, which has organized the festival for nearly two decades now. In 2003 and 2004, Festival on Wheels traveled to six cities in one go. “In 2004, it took 17 hours for us to travel from Van to Kayseri, making us realize how vast this country actually is.” He recalled how enthusiastic the audience was to experience the world of cinema in a way they never had before – some for the first time. Festival Director Başak Emre remembers “a woman among the audience in Artvin watching Lars von Trier’s Europa, knitting all throughout the film’s run.”
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