The third Turkish Film Festival, which features a line-up of five Turkish films, will
screen over four weekends at the following Cinema Nouveau theatres: Brooklyn
Mall, Pretoria, on 23 and 24 May; V&A Waterfront in Cape Town on 30 and 31 May;
Gateway Mall in Durban on 6 and 7 June; and The Mall, Rosebank, in Johannesburg,
on 13 and 14 June 2015.
All screenings will be free to the public and there is no pre-booking for the festival:
tickets can only be collected at the participating cinemas’ box-offices before each
film is shown.
The Turkish Film Festival is made possible by the Turkish Embassy in Pretoria. It is
supported by the Turkish Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture and Tourism, in
collaboration with Ster-Kinekor Cinema Nouveau, and with sponsorship from Turkish
Airlines, Defy, CISCO-Cape Town Iron and Steel Works and Kristal Home Textiles.
The festival offers cinema-lovers the opportunity to explore contemporary Turkish
cinema, with the screening of recent internationally-awarded films and box-office
successes.
The festival opens with Sivas, a drama which was awarded a Special
Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It follows the relationship between an injured
Kangal sheepdog named Sivas and an 11-year-old boy. Sivas, a fighting dog, is left
for dead after losing a brutal match. The boy saves his life, then tries to use Sivas
to impress his classmates.
The festival continues with a drama entitled Egg, which is the first
instalment of the Yusuf Trilogy, named after the eponymous lead character of the
series. Both the film and its director have won numerous awards at various
international festivals, including the 2007 World Film Festival of Bangkok, 2007
Valdivia International Film Festival and 2007 Sarajevo Film Festival.
Egg centres on poet Yusuf’s life following his mother’s death. He
returns to his hometown after many years, for the funeral.
Once Upon A Time, awarded the Grand Prix at the 2011 Cannes Film
Festival, is a film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It tells the story of a group of men who are
searching for a dead body on the Anatolian steppe. The film is based on real events,
and a number of quotations from stories by Anton Chekhov have been incorporated
into the script.
Yozgat Blues, which won the 29th Warsaw Film Festival Fipresci
Award, is the story of a city slicker forced to relocate to a small city in Turkey.
Yavuz is a music teacher in Istanbul who also performs occasionally as a musician.
When a performing gig is offered to him in Yozgat, a city in the middle of the
country, he decides to seize the opportunity, even though he is reluctant to trade
the stimulation of the big city for life in a more remote outpost. Although Yavuz is
the protagonist, the film is a group portrait of half a dozen people whose lives
intersect with his in Yozgat.
The festival closes with another drama, Love Likes Coincidences. One
September morning in 1977, a young man rushes his pregnant wife to the hospital
for the impending birth of their child. On the way, he crashes into another car,
whose driver is also a father-to-be. That accident becomes the first of many
coincidences that will connect the fates of the babies.
