ZOOM Meeting | Do you See Turkish Festival Dreams

A meeting of hearts and minds working to bring Turkish cinema to North America 

On June 11, 2025, at 7 PM EST, fifteen Turkish cinema enthusiasts from across the U.S. and Canada gathered on Zoom to share ideas, challenges, and aspirations around launching Turkish film festivals in North America. 

The meeting was hosted by Mr. Erju Akman, an independent film curator and editor of the Turkish Cinema Newsletter. He introduced special guest Mr. Erkut Gömülü, director of the Boston Turkish Film Festival and founder of the longest continuously running Turkish film festival in the U.S. 

Mr. Gömülü opened the floor by inviting each participant to introduce themselves. What followed was an engaging and inspiring discussion among organizers, curators, and community leaders passionate about Turkish cinema. 

From the Pacific Coast to the shores of Lake Michigan, attendees voiced their concerns—chief among them, the challenge of reaching wider audiences while navigating high distribution costs. 

Mr. Gömülü offered practical advice: start small, focus on selecting compelling films, and grow gradually. In the early years, it’s more important to bring rare, high-quality films to local audiences than to invest in expensive features like celebrity appearances. However, as interest builds, organizers might consider inviting Turkish actors and directors to attend in person. 

He emphasized the importance of setting a realistic, conservative budget and exploring all funding avenues—from grants to sponsorships. Contingency funds are essential for unexpected costs, and any surplus should be reinvested into future festivals. 

Several key topics emerged during the discussion: how to choose the right venues, obtain screening rights, navigate funding sources, and market effectively. For many, the biggest challenge is the limited representation—or misrepresentation—of Turkish culture in mainstream North American media. This presents both an obstacle and an opportunity. 

Reaching a large enough audience to cover costs requires a thoughtful strategy. Mr. Gömülü stressed the importance of passion and persistence. He recommended partnering with existing arts and culture festivals, reaching out to academic institutions, and tapping into university communities. Early collaborations with the Harvard Film Archive and Boston University’s College of Fine Arts were critical to his festival’s success. Later, the addition of short film and documentary competitions helped broaden their reach and promote a more nuanced understanding of Turkey and its people. 

The struggle against stereotypes isn’t unique to the Turkish diaspora, but the specifics are. As seen in the success of Iranian American film festivals, cinematic storytelling can entertain and educate, while shifting public perceptions over time. 

Many participants, themselves immigrants, spoke of a dual goal: reconnecting with their cultural roots while also building bridges within their new communities.  

Mr. Gömülü referenced a recent article by Mr. Akman (Turkish Film Festival Articles.pdf / previously provided ), which outlines cost-saving strategies for festival planning—offering yet another valuable tool for aspiring organizers that can help in budgetary considerations. 

A recurring theme throughout the conversation was collaboration. Boston’s partnerships with local colleges, Seattle’s coordination with other ethnic film festivals, and joint initiatives between regions all underscored the power of working together. 

For example, the Seattle Turkish Film Festival (STFF), led by Mr. Semih Tareen, recently supported a Texas-based team in launching their own festival. Mr. Tareen also advocates inter- community outreach exemplified by his collaboration with the Italian Film Festival in Seattle and extended an open offer to support similar initiatives across North America. 

Mr. Tareen shared Seattle’s approach to building an audience: focus on independent films with socially and politically relevant themes that appeal to the public—not just the Turkish community. Their festival screens both features and shorts and often brings over filmmakers, thanks to cost-effective programming and diligent sourcing of independent funds. In some cases, they’ve even hosted world premieres of rare indie films and regularly feature at least 1 filmmaker of acclaimed shorts. 

An especially innovative move by STFF has been its partnership with the Vancouver Turkish Film Festival (VTFF). By scheduling their festivals back-to-back, films and visiting filmmakers can travel from Seattle to Vancouver, maximizing exposure and minimizing cost-provided visas are secured for both countries. 

Many attendees are active volunteers within larger cultural organizations. The team from California, for example, is preparing to celebrate 50 years of community presence in the Golden state. 

Despite this long-standing history, securing arts funding remains a struggle—particularly for Turkish-focused initiatives. Regional collaboration, such as sharing resources between states and provinces, may offer a path forward. 

The one-hour call flew by, packed with thoughtful insights and a spirit of innovation. There was serious discussion of launching a traveling festival, starting on the West Coast, where groundwork between Seattle and Vancouver is already in place. Others proposed seeking out public-private partnerships and academic collaborations to expand reach and access to the arts. 

With these efforts, there is increased access to beloved content that not only deserve wider reach, but platforming these narratives has the added bonus of shinning a positive light on Turkish cinema created both within the Turkish border and beyond. 

The conversation ended on an optimistic note: while the primary barrier to launching Turkish film festivals remains funding, there are many tested and emerging pathways to success. Veterans like Mr. Gömülü, Mr. Akman, and Mr. Tareen encouraged continued dialogue, mentorship, and cooperation—planting the seeds for a vibrant future for Turkish cinema in North America. 

 

FUTURE ZOOM MEETINGS ARE PLANNED TO BE CONDUCTED IN TURKISH / ALL RELATED CORRESPONDENCE WILL BE IN ENGLISH. 

Ercument  Akman
Washington DC

T: 703 868 4312

E: eackman#gmail.com
maviboncuk.blogspot.com

turkfilm.blogspot.com

Minutes recorded and written by Billie Akman to be issued to all registrants and attendees.

Review: New Turkish Cinema By Olaf Möller

Columns | Books Around: New Turkish Cinema

By Olaf Möller[1]

 "I write regularly for Stadt-Revue, which is something like the Village Voice of my beloved hometown. Then there's film-dienst, the film magazine of the Catholic Church, to which I contribute sometimes more frequently and sometimes less, depending on the mood. Besides that, this daily or that magazine runs something by me, occasionally. But the only magazines I'm tied to rather closely are Film Comment and Cinema Scope. Everything else is just on a more or less piece-by-piece basis."

It was only a matter of time till a bunch of books on Turkish cinema would hit the stores; film-cultural fads work like that. To give things a more positive spin, what’s a passing fancy for many might be a life’s passion for a few who can now, in the tiny window of opportunity opened by hype, realize that one work they always dreamed about. And let’s face it, normally one wouldn’t get a book on Turkish cinema published too easily. (Next up: Romania—wait another two years and see…)

All that said, I’m very, very happy that there are finally a few tomes on Turkish cinema around. Chalk that up to my life and times: I grew up in a working-class neighbourhood of Cologne, which meant living alongside many migrant families, mostly from Turkey—Gastarbeiter, as they were (and sometimes still are) derogatively called. (Good thing that the presumed guests stayed, became residents, etc. and saved us from ourselves.) Anyway, Turkish neighbours and classmates also meant Turkish movies. Step 1: A schoolmate of mine and I watched unsubtitled videos at his family’s apartment (he translated, or at least tried, or probably only pretended to try and instead made up his own dialogue). The pleasures of Turkish entertainment! That unique cinegenie of Cüneyt Arkın and Kartal Tibet!! The soul-soothing absurdity of Çetin İnanç’s The Man Who Saves the World (1982)!!! Bliss. Step 2: Cologne’s now defunct cinematheque began to host the occasional season of Turkish films, the serious stuff above all: the master of masters, Yılmaz Güney. (I also fondly remember a screening of Police [1988], a coarse though smart comedy directed by Güney acolyte Şerif Gören, featuring Garib the parrot.) Step 3: Somewhere during the second half of the ‘90s, Turkish films slowly started to get distributed on a regular basis in German cinemas. An audience of millions wanted to be entertained; a now also defunct Cologne downtown multiplex had one or two screens reserved exclusively for Turkish films, usually subtitled, which allowed me to closely follow the careers of, say, Yavuz Turgul (The Bandit, 1996), Sinan Çetin (Propaganda, 1999), Yılmaz Erdoğan (Vizontele, 2001), and Serdar Akar (Valley of the Wolves—Iraq, 2005).

New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory

Publisher ‏ : ‎ I.B. Tauris (February 15, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1845119509
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1845119508

Asuman Suner Istanbul Technical University Associate Professor 

Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Reaktion Books (November 15, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1861893701
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1861893703

Gönül Dönmez-Colin is a film scholar specializing in the cinemas of Central Asia and the Middle East. She is the author of Women, Islam and Cinema, Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Filmmakers from the Middle East and Central Asia, and The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East.

None of these names probably means much to most readers, as they’re key directors of post-Yeşilçam commercial cinema, the kind of stuff that usually doesn’t make the international festival rounds. Sad to say that neither Gönül Dönmez-Colin’s Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging (London: Reaktion Books, 2008) nor Asuman Suner’s New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010) is going to change that, even if both try to incorporate them into their essentially art-house-focused-and-driven arguments. Dönmez-Colin’s work might at least entice a few curious souls to start looking for such titles as Akar’s ultra-ambivalent gems On Board (1998) and In the Bar (2006) or Sırrı Süreyya Önder and Muharrem Gülmez’s weird International (2006), while Suner’s book likely won’t lead to pressing demand to see Akar’s Offside (2006) or Çağan Irmak’s My Father and My Son (2005), despite some serious supportive phrases.

As the books’ sub-headings suggest, both are covering more or less the same ground vis-à-vis names and titles: there’s plenty on Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Zeki Demirkubuz, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, and Derviş Zaim, the four low-budget pioneers turned main auteurs of contemporary Turkish art-house cinema; home, migration, and exile in general are discussed, as well as the Deutschländer/Alamancı cinemas in particular; the Kurdish, Greek, and Armenian “questions” are addressed (the latter barely, as there are so few films even acknowledging the existence of Armenians); and then, of course, women and gender. Sorry to sound a bit dismissive but, really, these are the same themes that everybody and his/her/its grandmother routinely fills pages with, which begs the question of whether the books would have appeared at all if they strayed too far outside this familiar turf.

That said, Turkish cinema does invite these kinds of discussions—though what’s more puzzling is that Dönmez-Colin and Suner at times even have the same blind spots. (Let’s only note that neither of them thinks the blatant anti-Semitism of Akar’s Valley of the Wolves is worth considering in depth.) Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging proved to be the more enjoyable and enlightening read, which, to be honest, I didn’t expect, as I’m not exactly a fan of Dönmez-Colin: she always seemed too much the professional engagée to me. Whenever I read her texts I have the distinct impression that she’s supportive of (something that’s incidentally) a film because she thinks it’s good for us; here for once it feels as if she’s talking about carefully selected films that she likes. So even if the themes dealt with and arguments made are fairly generic, it’s still engaging, educational, and at times even fun to follow them through with her. Admittedly, her book has a major advantage over Suner’s: its scope. Dönmez-Colin discusses Turkish cinema in general (even if the last two-plus decades are the centre of her attention), which means that older masters like the venerable Atıf Yılmaz (Oh, Beautiful Istanbul, 1966), the great Ömer Kavur (Istanbul, 1981), or the ever-excellent Erden Kıral (A Season in Hakkari, 1983) are discussed a bit more extensively, while the likes of Lütfi Ömer Akad (Strike the Whore, 1949) and Metin Erksan (Dry Summer, 1963) at least get their due. Best of all, Dönmez-Colin devotes a whole chapter to Yılmaz Güney, and justifiably so considering his ongoing influence on younger directors, above all Ustaoğlu, as well as his pivotal importance for any discussion of Kurdish cinema. The importance of Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging lies in just that: Dönmez-Colin lays out convincingly how today’s Turkish cinema is connected to its past (even if at one point she wonders whether this isn’t a passé way of thinking). In a film-cultural climate where these kinds of developments seem to count less and less, this is an important argument to insist on.

While Dönmez-Colin from time to time references this historian-theorist or that essayist-philosopher, Suner does little else but in New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory. At least it feels like that. In the first chapters of this very academic read, Suner barely talks about the films as films, i.e., rarely describes an image, analyzes its components, or tries to understand what they mean. Instead, it’s content, content, symbol, content, historic backgrounds of the stories, some more content, and lots of digression-heavy references to all kinds of thinkers old and new; this is useful, of course, but leaves one wanting. Things get a bit more detailed in the chapters devoted to Ceylan and Demirkubuz, but not more interesting: Ceylan is all about home and paradox, Demirkubuz vexingly opaque. Yawn. And then, suddenly, there are a few pages of interest, and they’re devoted to two works by…Fatih Akın, of all people. Yet, what Suner has to say about the music in Head-On (2003) and Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) is worth reading and pondering. Beyond that, the book has little more to offer than the ordinary emptiness of a culture more interested in its own rituals and mores than the subjects they use to express these with—even if one does learn quite a few things.

Let’s recommend, in closing, the Senem Aytaç and Gözde Onaram-edited Young Turkish Cinema (Istanbul: altyazi, 2009). This slim, pleasantly done booklet was published to accompany a program of (mainly) debuts and sophomore efforts presented in Rotterdam at the IFFR and Linz at the Crossing Europe festival; it offers some crisp, well-informed, always personal, often partisan journalistic writing on films that don’t always warrant such generous treatment.

Olaf Moller

Posted in Columns, CS45, From Cinema Scope Magazine

[1] "Olaf Möller  is a freelance writer and programmer based in Cologne and Helsinki. He is a critic for various international film magazines and a consultant for several film festivals. He is an adjunct Professor of Film History and Theory at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture of Aalto University, and has co-written and published a variety of books on cinema." It's a typically modest blurb that appears at the end of innumerable articles for international film magazines but behind it lie countless texts for festival catalogs, regular columns in Cinema Scope and Film Comment (where Möller has also served as a European editor since 2004), annual festival reports.

 from Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam and Udine, books on filmmakers such as John Cook and Michael Pilz, selection duties for the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and curatorial work on retrospectives and film programs for the Austrian Film Museum. He also happens to be the Other First Secretary and Minister of Spirituality of the Ferroni Brigade.

There are several qualities that Möller has brought to the proverbial table of film criticism since the beginning of the last decade: a) astute and well-informed writing, with an instantly recognizable style and his own brand of syntax and punctuation, balancing seriousness and humor without lapsing into dry academispeak or empty witticisms; b) unprecedented knowledge of the blind spots of film history and contemporary cinephilia, based on years of indefatigable investigation and championing of the unknown, unseen, ignored and forgotten directors and films; c) a total lack of snobbish territoriality that is all too frequent among some trailblazers; d) contempt for what currently passes as political correctness and politeness, never shying away from strong opinions (some of his favorite targets are cinephilia as a "cult of universal surface," "abstract humanism" and a paternalistic approach to non-Western cultures), even if he occasionally puts off some of his readers and colleagues (no wonder one highly respected Australian critic has called him "Olaf the Mauler"). SOURCE

Interview with Olaf Möller, Part 1 | Interview with Olaf Möller, Part 2

Harvard | Conversation Olaf Möller

Zeki Demirkubuz | Two Interviews

Director Zeki Demirkubuz and Selim Evci, one of the notable names of independent cinema, came together with moviegoers in a talk held on March 20, 2025, as part of the 21st Akbank Short Film Festival. The directors shared their creative processes in Turkish cinema, the difficulties of short film production, and their own experiences, offering important perspectives to the audience.