Category: Culture/Art

Berlinale Crowns Crystal Bear Winners: Turkey’s “Lal Gece” & New Zealand’s “Meathead”

The Berlinale’s winners of the Crystal Bears from the Generation 14plus (youth) jury are Reis Çelik’s “Lal Gece” from Turkey as Best Feature Film and Special Mention for Ella Lemhagen’s “Kronjuvelerna” from Sweden.

Best Short Film is Sam Holst’s “Meathead” from New Zealand and the Special Mention short film is Isamu Hirabayashi’s “663114” from Japan.

Details on the films and reasons for their selection are below. Awards will be given to winners tonight, along with a screening of “Lal Gece” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Cinema 1, at 7:30pm CET.

Crystal Bear for the Best Feature Film: “Lal Gece”

by Reis Çelik, Turkey 2011

We were deeply touched by he brilliant actors in this year’s winning film. They let us take part in the feelings of two people who are imprisoned by family traditions which do not leave them any space for their own decision making and needs. We were especially impressed by the film’s setting – a room where the drama unfolds. Just as for the couple, it is impossible for the audience to leave it.

Special Mention Feature Film: “Kronjuvelerna”

by Ella Lemhagen, Sweden 2011

Friendship, love, family, the divide between poor and rich, disabilities and sickness were only a few of the Themes flowing effortlessly into one another in this complex and many-layered Film.

The fairytale style does not in any way detract from the dramatic sequence of events. The great acting brought forth the entire Spectrum of Emotions, from which the Audience had no escape. This film touched us deeply. A real Masterpiece!

Crystal Bear for the Best Short Film: “Meathead”

by Sam Holst, New Zealand 2011

The film shows us, just in a few minutes, the radical path from childhood to adulthood. Using authentic images the film portrays the rituals of a closed communities which you cannot escape from. The film exemplifies peer pressure and social pressure which can be found in all societies. For us, it has all the qualities necessary for a great short film.

Special Mention Short Film: “663114”

by Isamu Hirabayashi, Japan 2011

Visuals and Sound melded together flawlessly to create a philosophical and layered masterpiece. The director conveys his message, beyond all conventions. Through a simple metaphor he portrays the survival of a culture, even in the face of catastrophe.

The members of the Youth Jury in the Generation 14plus:

Klara Kruse Rosset

Gülcan Çil

Solveig Lethen

Jarnail Fang Yu Singh Sekhon

Sami Yacob

Nico Palesch

Lino Steinwärder

via Berlinale Crowns Crystal Bear Winners: Turkey’s “Lal Gece” & New Zealand’s “Meathead” | Filmmakers, Film Industry, Film Festivals, Awards & Movie Reviews | Indiewire.

February 18, 2012
Quiet market traders? Istanbul may as well just install vending machines

A shouting ban is crazy, as markets are meant to be noisy places – you should have heard my grandfather sell his wares

guardian.co.uk

A fish monger in front of his stall at a market in Istanbul, Turkey

A fishmonger in front of his stall at a market in Istanbul, Turkey. Photograph: Alamy

I once made a surprised man fall over a small dog by shouting at him in a market, which is testimony – if any were needed – to the power of vocal advertising. Markets are supposed to be noisy. They are the last unsterilised retail environment, and banning shouting, heckling, recreational foul language and casual threats would be like carpeting the Amazon. But sadly, this is exactly what authorities in Turkey have done, by introducing a law last month that bans traders from shouting and singing.

Market trading has been in my family for generations and so I feel a sense of comradeship with those in Turkey now being forced to quieten down. My own grandfather would stand in Petticoat Lane with fabric stolen from a Limehouse curtain wholesaler and go about his business shouting: “All nicked! Nothing legal! Take it off my hands quickly ladies – I’m too pretty for prison.” Let’s consider this for a moment – here is a man, loudly proclaiming an actual crime and furthermore stating an enthusiastic desire to make an actual profit from it, in broad daylight, in the middle of London. Remarkable.

In Britain, selling fruit and veg from a market stall is still sometimes a licence for foul talk. It can often just pour out of you as soon as you put your money belt on. Good fruit and veg market shopping can be like buying stuff from her out of The Exorcist. But it’s always, I hope, just a bit of fun. Many of my counterparts in Istanbul have managed to turn this kind of thing into song. They’ve given the format lyrical integrity, like Rodgers and Hammerstein. Brilliant.

There is certainly a need to stop traders harassing shoppers, but that’s because harassment is a crime, not advertising your wares. Many London markets prohibit heckling by traders, but this works because most of the larger ones are now entirely gentrified. It’s all cupcakes and knitwear, from Camden Town to Greenwich. After all, crochetwork is a tricky thing to heckle passers-by about. It wouldn’t stop me having a go, though, as you can probably imagine. But anyway. The point is that people are going to these markets for entirely different reasons to those visiting our friends in Istanbul. As long as the traders aren’t heckling each other – which any half decent market manager will stamp on immediately – a bit of volume absolutely makes the occasion.

Perhaps the Turkish authorities should do away with all the market stalls and install row after row of vending machines, with Mariah Carey being piped through the sound system to add a bit of acceptable ambiance. No one would ever go, of course, and the city would be poorer, both in terms of market rents and cultural character.

“There is no joy in a market shrouded in silence,” said one Turkish market-goer, interviewed about the change in legislation. She is entirely correct. Surely the world is already joyless enough without stopping barrow boys singing about mandarins.

via Quiet market traders? Istanbul may as well just install vending machines | Paul Smith | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

February 16, 2012
IF Istanbul Film Festival invites filmmakers to Sundance Labs

If Istanbul Independent Film Festival’s collaboration with the Sundance Institute for screenwriting workshops comes with a more extensive program this year. Guests evaluate the process for the Hürriyet Daily News

In its second year IF IstanbulIndependent Film Festival’s collaboration with the Sundance Institute for screenwriting workshops comes with a more elaborate program under the title of Sundance Labs.

Alesia Walton, associate director of the Feature Film Program at the Sundance Institute, who is also to give a panel on screenwriting, directors’ labs and future film programs of the institute in the second day of Sundance Labs workshop program, told the Hürriyet Daily News she hoped the program would turn into a self-sustaining body, and therefore they were reinforcing the infrastructure of what they began last year.

“Our first year of this program was wonderful and unique, in that it combined a mini screenwriter’s lab, screenwriting panel, a Film Forward screening series and a case study of a previous lab project: Amreeka. We were fortunate to have a group of diverse, smart advisors and an inaugural class of writing/directing fellows who represented a wide variety of Turkish filmmakers, selected by our partners at IF,” she said, adding although it took a long time to gain a deep understanding of a culture and its history, particularly a place as rich, vibrant and complex as Turkey, she believed the lab offered an unusually insightful and personal point of entry via the projects of the filmmakers and the conversations surrounding their work.

“All of our programs have changed a great deal over time, and with each year we expect that this program will grow and eventually take on an evolving identity and form. This will be determined by the place’s individual culture and the specific needs of the local film world, and we look forward to seeing how this will take shape in subsequent years,” she said.

‘Write the film in your heart’

The first event of the Sundance Labs will be a screenwriting panel with the participation of renowned independent filmmakers Audrey Wells, Athina Rachel Tsangiri and other Sundance experts. On the third day of the program Sally El Hosaini will attend the Sundance Case Study Lab with her film “My Brother the Devil,” which has also undergone the Sundance Lab process.

Speaking to the Daily News, El Hosaini said what impressed her most about the Sundance Institute Labs was the way they were structured around individual needs. “The labs are basically a series of one-on-one meetings with creative advisors. But these advisors don’t force their views upon you or hold the answers to making your script better. Screenwriting is too subjective for black and white answers anyway. Instead the sessions were more of an informal discussion. An opportunity for you to go deeper into yourself and to examine the reasons you wrote what you did and a chance for you to hold a mirror up to your script, yourself and your own process. This journey of self examination was incredibly illuminating.”

She added that it was always up to the participant to decide what direction he or she wanted to take things. “It does not matter whether you agree or disagree with a certain creative advisor. The more open you are to this kind of process the more you get out of it. Ultimately, we are each on our own paths; there is no right or wrong route. The labs helped me focus my project and to really understand what story I wanted to tell and why. I was able to get rid of the unnecessary elements and achieve more depth in the areas I wanted to dig deeper into,” she said.

On being asked what she would suggest to future participants of the filmmaking workshops in Turkey within the scope of If Istanbul, El Hosaini said, “Write the film that’s in your heart. The story that you’re most passionate about and that you need to see brought to life. That’s the only secret.”

Hürriyet Daily News

February 15, 2012
First Turkish coffee museum opened in Istanbul

Source: ANSAmed

Turkish coffee, one of the country’s symbols, now has its ”first museum” where visitors can learn how to make it correctly and have the opportunity to receive a certificate.

Turkish coffee, one of the country’s symbols, now has its ”first museum” where visitors can learn how to make it correctly and have the opportunity to receive a certificate.

The newspaper Hurriyet reports that the museum, opened in cooperation with Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Ministry, is considered the ”first place where Turkish coffee is cooked and served in the most prominent way”, as described by the Turkish Coffee Culture and Research Centre. The ceremony was conducted on Saturday in the presence of Culture and Tourism Minister Ertugrul Gunay.

The Minister, underlining the interest from abroad for Turkish coffee which became clear during the recent presentation of the project in the Far East, stressed the importance of the beverage for Turkish culture and pointed out that this importance was not officially reflected through any initiative, before the museum was opened.

”A cup of coffee is remembered for 40 years,” according to a Turkish way of saying, quoted by the Minister. Turkish coffee is made by putting very finely ground coffee in an ”ibrik”, a small kettle usually made of brass, together with water, sugar and sometimes spices like cardamom depending on tradition. The ingredients are boiled three times, making the final result syrupy. Before drinking, it must be left to settle for a few minutes. What remains at the bottom is used for a king of prophecy-making, practiced in Turkey and in the former Ottoman properties in the Balkan area.

CEO Orhan Hallik of the BKG company that has promoted this and other similar initiatives with Gunay’s Ministry said: ”Here we will serve tourists traditional Turkish coffee. We will enable them to drink the ‘real’ Turkish coffee and experience the way it is cooked and served.”

There will also be an ”education programme,” in which will be explained ”how Turkish coffee first came to the Ottoman Empire, the opening of the first coffee house, and how it became popular in Europe. We also tell visitors about the unique ritual of cooking and serving Turkish coffee. Those who finish the education program will be given a certificate,” Hallik announced to Hurriyet, though the article does not specify the length of the programme.

The first certificate was handed out to the Minister who, after the opening ceremony, made a Turkish coffee in the venue’s kitchen. Turkey is proud of its traditions and of everything Turkish and has protected its national culture by law. Another symbol of Turkey in the eyes of the West, smoking, is on its way back on the other hand due to new regulations and campaigns against smoking.

The Turkish government has issued new health rules that make it even necessary to cover the cigar Clint Eastwood is smoking in a western from the ’60s on television, using a stylised orange flower.

via Turkey: First Turkish coffee museum opened in Istanbul :: EMG :: SEE news.

February 15, 2012
“Turkey Now” festival to introduce Turkish art and culture

Netherlands: “Turkey Now” festival to introduce Turkish art and culture

The 4th “Turkey Now” festival will begin in the Netherlands on February 23. The festival aims to introduce Turkish art and culture to Dutch people.

February 12, 2012
The Istanbul Art-Boom Bubble

Istiklal Caddesi, the central pedestrian artery of Istanbul. More Photos »

By SUZY HANSEN

Earlier this winter, the giant 120-year-old Ottoman bank building in Istanbul reopened as a multimillion-dollar contemporary art space called SALT. This was surprising. Turks were never big on contemporary art, and for years rich people didn’t visit that part of town. When I moved to the neighborhood five years ago, it was all electrical-supply stores and abandoned buildings and men smoking. My building didn’t have heat; girlfriends wouldn’t visit after dark; a neighbor once attacked another neighbor with a small sword. I don’t see swords in Istanbul anymore. I do see a lot more art.

One evening in November, Turks and foreigners traipsed up the cobbled sidewalks to SALT’s huge, heavy doors for the opening-night party. The headline exhibit featured thousands of old black-and-white photographs taken by a dead Armenian studio photographer and carefully assembled by the young artist Tayfun Serttas. Another exhibit was an installation by Gulsun Karamustafa, Turkey’s doyenne of contemporary art. Another was about archaeology and Europeans looting the Ottoman Empire.

But the space overwhelmed the art. It was too magnificent. Nothing like SALT existed in Istanbul. Inside, the building was five floors and 100,000 square feet of carved white marble. Curators, bankers, interior designers, writers, musicians, academics, artists and wealthy wives craned their necks to take in the soaring ceiling as they climbed the grand staircases. They gaped at the stylish library, and the plush movie theater, and the smoking terrace that was also a restaurant. The great imperial bulk of SALT loomed over the Golden Horn and the forlorn rooftops below.

Foreigners and expats gushed with approval. Even the fatalistic Turks, skeptical of Westerners’ enthusiasm, couldn’t help admitting that this strange art institution was awesome.

It appears that Istanbul, which went from a cosmopolitan wonderland in the 19th century to, in the Nobel-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk’s words, a “pale, poor, second-class imitation of a Western city” for much of the 20th, is having its moment of rebirth. These newly wealthy corners of the East seem full of possibilities, but what kind of culture will the Turks create?

On my way out, I ran into Mari Spirito, a longtime director at 303 Gallery in New York. Spirito had just moved to Turkey to set up a nonprofit called Protocinema. Above our heads, Arabic script was etched into the marble: “He who earns money is God’s beloved servant.”

“In New York it feels like the best years are behind us,” she said. “In Istanbul it feels like the best years are yet to come.”

Those best years might be a long way off, many Turks would joke, but still, it is a heady time to be young and talented in Istanbul. One summer night I accompanied a group of women as they finished their dinner at a meze tavern, put on red lipstick and stopped for a bottle of raki (Turkey’s national liquor) and cigarettes on their way to a party not far from SALT. Especially on muggy evenings, Istiklal Caddesi, the central pedestrian artery of the city, swarms with people, bodies colliding as Turks and tourists race to shops, cafes and bars. Arms around one another, the women maneuvered through Istiklal’s traffic into Rumeli Han, an Ottoman-era arcade building that exudes a faded, dingy glory, with sooty stone staircases and crumbling ceilings. Up a few flights, past the Communist Party office, music drifted out of an artists’ studio. Beer bottles and cans covered the table and floor; a stack of easels leaned against a wall; the girls poured their raki into tiny plastic cups and found a seat with their friends.

“This place has become a meeting point,” one gallery owner said. “It’s feeding the underground scene.”

In a long room, about 40 Turks were watching the performance group Ha Za Vu Zu play music. The 20- and 30-somethings sat on the floor and listened quietly. Some women wore retro styles, ’40s hair and cigarette pants. Men with poofs of black curls lounged in T-shirts. A pretty girl in a sundress thrust an invitation into my hand. “I’m having my first show!” she said. The venue was the prominent exhibition space Arter. “Please come.”

The artists then began dancing to old Turkish rock, a hybrid of Western and Anatolian music, joining together in a modern version of traditional Turkish dancing: arms spread wide, women and men dancing together in pairs. The vibe was anything but self-conscious; it felt like a safe place to go nuts. Shoes came off, feet turned black. After a few hours, sweat pouring down their faces, the men took off their shirts, shouting, laughing, stamping. Someone danced into a heart-shaped ashtray, spilling cigarette butts on the floor; a woman took off her shirt, too.

via The Istanbul Art-Boom Bubble – NYTimes.com.

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February 11, 2012