Feast of festival films on way
MOVIES FROM TURKEY RANGE FROM DRAMA TO COMEDY
The Girl with the Red Scarf is ‘the world’s greatest love story’.
Cinema Nouveau will host the fifth Turkish Film Festival in Johannesburg from today until Sunday at the Rosebank Mall, followed by the Durban edition of the festival from October 20 to 22.
The Banff Film Festival will follow in November at Ster-Kinekor Sandton City.
The Turkish Film Festival is made possible with support of Turkey’s ministries of foreign affairs and culture and tourism, in collaboration with Ster-Kinekor Cinema Nouveau. Globally wellknown companies Turkish Airlines, Defy, CISCO and Radisson Blu (Sandton) are also among the sponsors.
Turkish Film Festival
The showcase movie of the festival is My Mother’s Wound. This ambitious drama is directed by Ozan Aciktan and draws attention to the aftermath of the Bosnian war. In a gripping tale of family, love and identity, Salih searches for hope among wartorn lives.
On turning 18, he leaves the orphanage to find his lost family and begins working on a Serbian farm. Suddenly, at the most unexpected moment, he finds a home. But will he ever be able to let go of the ghosts of his past and be happy in this new life? As the tension escalates, disquieting secrets surface.
Unique Life, a comedy from Cagan Irmak, one of Turkey’s most popular filmmakers, tells the story of Nadide, who is searching for happiness after the death of her husband. Now over 50, Nadide once chose marriage over college and a career and struggled to keep her family together. After losing her husband, she decides to enrol in college. There she finds herself on a journey to a new start in life with a group of young students and a mysterious captain.
Inspired by the novel of acclaimed writer Cengiz Aytmatov, The Girl with the Red Scarf, is a classic love story. It is said, in fact, that the French poet Aragon described The Girl with the Red Scarf as “the world’s greatest love story”. What is love? What makes a lover? What makes a spouse? What makes a father? And which is harder: to go back or not to go back? Eyvah Eyvah 2, a comedy, is the second instalment of the Eyvah Eyvah Triology. Huseyin, a clarinetist from a village in Turkey’s Thracian region, is a young man living with his grandparents. Two things are of great importance in Huseyin’s life: his clarinet and his fiancee.
In the first film, Huseyin was forced to go to Istanbul to search for his real father. He teams up with an eccentric nightclub singer called Firuzan. After finding his father, Huseyin tries to reach his fiancee, who moves to a small village in the Turkish countryside.
Husband Factor is the story of
Efsun, 30, seeking true love and a romantic relationship rather than a husband. She is the black sheep of her peers and the women of her family, who are programmed for marriage.
She is seeking love yet she does not know what most girls know: how to strike an attitude, or how to manipulate a man. Hence, she has not had a single steady relationship.
But her family are all dedicated to initiating Efsun into the intricacies of womanhood and ensuring she gets hitched into the “happily ever after”. Efsun surrenders herself into the capable hands of these women.
All screenings will be free. Tickets can be booked and collected at the box offices one hour prior to each show. For more information, visit the Cinema Nouveau website at cinemanouveau.co.za.
Banff Film Festival
Featuring the best mountain films and exceptional filmmaking talent from around the globe, the festival offers something for everyone with a mix of topics and cinematic styles and features some of the world’s most epic adventure locations from Iceland’s frosty surf spots and Utah’s canyon country, to Siberia’s snowy slopes and the plains of Patagonia. Attendees will also see this year’s winning submission from the annual Cape Union Mart Adventure Film Challenge, One Fly at a Time by Dewald Brand. – Citizen reporter
What is love? What makes a lover?