A film festival weaves a narrative. Through their programming national film festivals tell a story about a country at a particular time. When we organised the first Turkish film festival in Australia in 1998, we deliberately set out to challenge and educate an Australian audience that had outdated notions of a country in rapid transition. We also hoped to counter prevailing perceptions of the approximately 150 000-strong Turkish diaspora for whom Turkish film production was still perceived as second-rate or irrelevant. The following paper is a reflection on the promotion and reception of the Turkish film festival in light of Turkey’s cinematic revival, underway since the landmark film Eskiya released in 1997.
In many cases festivals are vehicles for an official projection of the nation state organised by an arm of the respective government, be that the Goethe Institute, the British Council, the Japan Foundation, the Australian Film Commission or Alliance Française etc. However this has been rare in Turkey’s case. Promoting culture and art abroad is something quite recent for the Turkish government. Before the cultural revival of the last few years, Turkey had a weak and corrupt civil government that seemed to lurch from one crisis to the next and often sought to censor aspects of the society both culturally and politically. On the international political stage, Turkish nationhood was contested primarily due to the war raging in the Kurdish-dominated south-east and the issue of Turkish Cyprus.
Despite the lack of government support, the revival of, and interest in, Turkish filmmaking has seen an exponential increase in the number of Turkish film festivals held outside of Turkey since the late 1990s. In most cases these festivals are independently organised by individuals or organizations stepping into the vacuum left by a weak civil state. It was into this vacuum that we stepped in 1997.
The first Turkish film festival in Australia (October-November 1998) was a reciprocal event to the first Australian Film festival held in Istanbul in October 1994.(2) Both film festivals were independently organised by Bruce Jeffreys and myself and funded through a combination of support from the Australian government and private sponsorship from a number of corporations including international airlines and transport companies.(3) The Turkish film festival in Australia was a four-day festival that toured three of Australia’s biggest cities — Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. Total audience numbers were over 4000. We endeavoured to make both festivals cross-cultural events and therefore accessible to the cinema-going public of both countries as well as the local communities from that language group. This was achieved through careful selection of the location of the events and the subtitling of the films in both English/Turkish. In Australia, especially in Melbourne and Sydney where there are significant numbers of Turkish migrants, we could have located the festival close to where the diaspora is concentrated. However in both cases these areas are quite a distance from the city centres, so in terms of accessibility for non-Turkish Australians we deliberately chose venues that were within the ‘neutral zone’ of the inner-city. This was intended to avoid defining the festival as solely a Turkish community event.
Problematizing Festival Promotion
In publicising an event such as the Turkish Film festival, one of the obvious starting points is the need to construct and utilise the term ‘Turkish cinema’ in a way that is meaningful for a country such as Australia. Scarce information circulates about Turkey in the Australian media milieu beyond mere touristic images of ancient ruins and eastern exotica, or the ‘noble Turk’ of Gallipoli; the famous World War One battle in which many Australians perished.(4) For Turkish Australians perceptions of film production could be encapsulated by the insult, ‘like a Turkish film’; a saying implying the excessive melodrama and bad taste of an earlier era of Turkish cinema.
One of Turkish cinema’s fundamental problems, a problem plaguing many national cinemas, is that it is not perceived as a niche cinema, unlike the French, Italian or Iranian national cinemas, which have all developed their own particular markets in opposition to Hollywood. But like these cinemas Turkish cinema can create a sense of difference through its language and culture. However trying to capitalise on this sense of difference for promotional purposes poses another issue; how is it done without reducing projections of the nation to mere tourist images?
A related issue is the messiness of the term ‘Turkish cinema’.(5) For instance, how accurate is this term for a group of films that have their origins not only in Turkey. Could we have labelled it a European film festival given that four of the seven films were actually co-productions (Karisik Pizza — France; Eskiya, Agir Roman and Akrebin Yolculugu— Euroimages; Usta Beni Oldursense — Hungary, Germany and UK). Still these were co-productions in predominantly financial terms rather than in content or story material. Another question is: how representative of the whole of Turkey are these films given that five out of the seven were set in Istanbul?
We thought it was important to make a break from the stereotypes and tourist-brochure clichéd images that would reduce Turkey to a place of exotic oriental mysticism, minarets, blue mosques and endless beaches. But then we faced the problem of finding a suitably sophisticated image to exploit for the purposes of promotion. In the early days of the festival organization we used the crescent moon. But that image became immediately problematized because for some Turks it signifies an archaic Ottoman past that embodies nothing relating to modern-day Turkey. We were also sensitive to the crescent moon’s links to Islam within the current climate of Islamic fundamentalism. After consulting many Turkish Australians it became evident that whatever image we used would be problematic.
The graphic we eventually selected for the promotional poster came from the film Karisik Pizza with the following slogan, ‘“Get out there on the Edge”- For the first time in Australia, a festival of films leading the Turkish cinema revival’. The slide graphic depicting a scene from the film was then rendered to make it appear like a video image. Our intention was to generate curiosity and interest while not exploiting the obvious elements of exotica. We wanted to create an impression that Turkey’s was a dynamic, rapidly growing film industry where something is happening – a revival akin to Iran’s of the late 80s and early 90s perhaps. We were also trying to allude to Turkey’s unique position on the edge of two continents enabling its culture to embody a European-Asian synergy.
To increase the awareness that this was a festival catering to a huge cross-section of tastes, we marketed the films individually through the brochure, the website and the little media attention we received. For example, for those who desired an exotic, Ottoman extravaganza, Istanbul Kanatlarimin Altinda was suitable; while for those who craved the minimalism redolent of Mohsen Makhmalbaf or Kiarostami, Kasaba would be an obvious choice. A sense of philosophical Eastern mysticism could be found in viewing Akrebin Yolculugu, whereas for lovers of action-thrillers, Karisik Pizza would appeal.
The Question of Media and Audience
The Turkish media response to the Australian festival in Istanbul in 1994 had been overwhelming, to the extent that journalists were often chasing us for a story. This is evidently a result of having far greater competition between newspapers and reflects the extraordinarily dynamic media environment, which exists in Turkey. In Australia however the mainstream media was so difficult to penetrate that we were often left wondering what we had done wrong.
Reflecting back on this experience what we witnessed first hand we believe was the (negative) operation of ‘multiculturalism’, a policy that has been employed on and off in Australia since the early 1970s by both conservative and Labor governments alike. Under this policy, specific funding has been available to develop an ethnic media sector through the direct funding of organizations such as the national Special Broadcasting Corporation (SBS). This station was unique in the world and broadcasts in over 40 languages per week. Another example of multiculturalism as a policy can be seen at work in the granting of free radio licences to community-based radio stations that broadcast in languages other than English. The process of creating a separate virtual space within which different cultural events can exist and be promoted for the benefit of a particular ethnic group leaves mainstream Australian society virtually untouched by these other cultures and as a result easily marginalised. This was the case with our festival. In so-called multicultural Australia, a Turkish film festival was worthy of support but only as an ethnic community event that did not cross over into mainstream (Anglo-Celtic dominated) Australia. The event was effectively constrained by the media as being ‘too ethnic’. Generally this attitude is implicit but on one occasion it became explicit. In trying to secure a radio interview or just some airtime with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC (our equivalent to the UK’s BBC), a producer explained to us that there was little interest in the festival because it was ‘too ethnic’ and not mainstream enough. The only media which existed for the festival was the SBS or Turkish community radio programmes; mainstream organizations such as the ABC were then free to get on with representing mainstream culture. For them it seemed that to be a migrant from a non-English speaking diaspora was a private matter and not part of the public sphere. Perhaps this is what happens when you lack the kind of media diversity that exists in Turkey; events like this become easily marginalised.
