The 10th Anadolu University Eskishehir film festival wound up its ten day run on May 12 with no particular fanfare, just the usual 24 daily on and off campus screenings. Altogether local film fans were treated to over seventy films selected from all periods of film history from Chaplin silents, through early Hitchcock up to a wide selection of new festival films such as Scorcese’s Rolling Stones documentary “Shine a Light” which opened Berlin this year and “No Country for Old Men” a multi-Oscar winner in March. Fourteen Turkish films from 2007 and 2008 provided an overview of what is currently happening in the Turkish film industry. Unfortunately many Turkish films were not accompanied with English subtitles so the handful of foreign guest were sort of left out in the cold in this area.

Eskishehir is still very much of a local festival not fully set up to receive foreign visitors, of which, in any case, there were less than ten, so the vast majority of viewers had no problems enjoying all films regardless of the language, as non-Turkish films were all well subtitled in Turkish. Among European guests were a couple of directors, Jacob Berger of France and Henk Penningas of Friesland, presenting films and a master class, Andres Mand, an Estonian professor of Animation from Volda University in Norway, accompanying him lovely Lisa Viki from the Estonian edition of “Cosmopolitan”, and Yours Truly, a mild mannered reporter from the Daily Film Festival Planet. During the last three days the festival was graced with a visit by Italian production designer Luciano Calosso who is the architect and curator of the special new Visconti exhibit which was a highlight of the week. Luchiano works for the Italian ministry of Foreign affairs in the promotion of Italian film culture and is a man of many surprising ideas. The next exhibit he is preparing will be called Fellini at the Dinner table and is a collection of forty sketches which Fellini made on dinner napkins “a tavola” because his intense creative drive never stopped, even when he was taking his meals.

The Eskishehir University festival was started ten years ago by Gülseren Güchan who is the head of the comunications and media department here and a true film lover from way back. For the first five years it was basically a campus event for students, but for the past five years there has been an effort to push forth into real film festival territory by inviting prominent Turkish film personalities to an annual opening ceremony. Considering that there are already at least four well established full-scale film festivals in Turkey (Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya and Adana) this is a pretty big order, but Eskishehir seems to have fairly deep pockets, state-of-the-art-cinemas in town, excellent guest facilities, and generally a fairly solid festival type infrastructure.

Gülseren is hoping to be able to lure some name directors and/or actors from outside of Turkey next year to give this hinterland festival a higher profile and a more international flavor. The city itself is well worth a visit with dusty side streets dotted with leftover smokestacks from no longer existing factories next to ultra-modern coffee shops, outlets of the Swiss market chain Migros, and a state-of-the-art Espark shopping mall only months old, as well as the most beautiful tramway cars in Captivity – beyond the best I have seen anywhere in Europe. All day jets scream overhead because Eskishehir is, among other things, the center for jet-pilot training in Turkey. Add to this the handsome modern Anadolu U. Campus, which looks like an outlying branch of the California State College system, and it’s hard to believe that that you are basically in the Anatolian outback somewhere between Ankara and Istanbul. Above all, once here it’s the warm Turkish hospitality and friendliness of the people that will make you want to come back, however, the bottom line is that Eskishehir is still a college campus based local event in search of a film festival and concerted efforts need to be made to give it a more international character if Gülseren’s festival dream is to be realized.

Alex, back in Budapest
May 15, 2008