Indie film festival showcases Turkey's new directors

Turkey is seeing a wave of independent filmmaking despite tiny budgets and constraints on political speech, part of a booming industry producing hundreds of new films each year.

The main showcase for independent film is the !f Istanbul Independent Film Festival, which wrapped up its 17th edition on March 4 following additional screenings in Ankara and Izmir. It drew 80,000 viewers to 110 films, including 15,000 people who watched digital broadcasts in 33 cities across Turkey and the region.

“There is a flourishing diversity in the films we are seeing, with the circumstances here producing their own stories, whether it is about Syrian refugees or what’s happening on the border. There is a sense of urgency in telling these stories,” Pelin Turgut, !f’s co-founder and associate director, said in an interview with Al-Monitor. “As the whole industry grows, so too does the indie part.”

More than half of Turkey’s box-office sales, which totaled 870.7 million liras ($230 million) in 2017, are for domestic films, the highest national market share in Europe. Some 71 million people went to the movies last year, despite a slowing economy and a state of emergency imposed in the wake of a 2016 abortive military coup that has imprisoned tens of thousands of the government’s opponents, including dozens of journalists.