Can you imagine a festival on wheels, presenting 80-90 films while travelling 3000-4000 kilometers ?
The Festival on Wheels was first organized in 1995 to present remarkable films to the film lovers in various cities. Being a member of the European Coordination of Film Festivals, the festival visits different cities to present its program during four weeks…
Within the last fourteen years, the Festival visited Ankara, Artvin, Baku (Azerbaijan), Bursa, Çanakkale, Diyarbakır, Drama(Greece), Eskişehir, Gaziantep, İstanbul, İzmir, Kars, Kayseri, Malatya, Mersin, Samsun, Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Tbilissi (Georgia) and Van.
The Festival invites filmmakers from different countries and introduces them to their Turkish counterparts to enable potential co-projects. It also contributes to the marketing of the festival films to commercial theatres and to tv companies.
The guests of the festival will be hosted in Kars, an old town at the Armenian border where Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow took place. The guests will have the opportunity to see the cultural and historical heritage of Kars together with the city of Ani having 8000 years of roots, the Lake Cıldır and the ski center in Sarıkamıs.
Each year the Festival screens 25-30 feature films and 60-70 recent short films. We also present retrospectives. Each year, a selection of the year’s best new Turkish films and a retrospective of a Turkish director or classics from the Turkish cinema are in our program.
Festival on Wheels have an international competition among the recent feature films. The jury will award the following prizes: The Festival Grand Prize, “The Golden Goose” of the City of Kars for the best film in competition, the Special Jury Prize “The Silver Goose” of the City of Kars for the second best film in the competition. The short films in the Short is Good section will compete for the Audience Award.
Workshops: In 2008 with the collaboration of NISI MASA European Youth Cinema Network; Nisimazine Kars and One-Take workshops were held. In the framework of Let’s Talk Cinema in Kars III, workshops on film direction (by the director of My Only Sunshine, Times and Winds; Reha Erdem) digital cinematography (by the cinematographer of Three Monkeys, Climates; Gokhan Tiryaki), art direction (by the art director of Dot, Journey to the Sun; Natali Yeres), editing (by the editor of Summer Book; Cicek Kahraman) and experimental filmmaking (by Nursen Bakir) for young filmmakers and stop motion animation workshop (by Petra Dolleman) for primary school children were organised. During these workshops 23 films were produced.
This is the 15th fascinating gathering of the Festival on Wheels. For fourteen years we have been sharing our excitement with film lovers and filmmakers. It is a real festive with colourful evenings, Turkish hospitality and the specialities of Turkish cuisine. How about watching films while wining and dining with fabulous people in an authentic atmosphere?
This, we ensure, will be a unique experience to remember…
