City to City: Istanbul

By Cameron Bailey and Kate Lawrie Van de Ven

Istanbul: a place with such a deep and turbulent history that songs have been written about its name changes. In Byzantine times, it was popularly referred to throughout the empire simply as “The City.” This sprawling agglomeration somehow manages to bridge two continents, draw together myriad cultures, bristle with political ennui, throb with economics and positively explode with creative life force.

This year, City to City explores a site that transforms completely depending on the angle of your view, the whims of your guide or the day of the week. It abounds with internal contradictions – chic clubs in Bebek, the spiralling towers of minarets, the dome of the Blue Mosque, the long shadows cast by dozens of new high-rise apartment buildings or the Kurdish vendors along the Bosphorus shore. And yet about all this tapestry of juxtaposition, there hangs a sense of the sadness of history’s passing that inspires the city’s most famous literary son, Orhan Pamuk, who has written “For me, it has always been a city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy.”

Indeed, the history is here; but in any free space it is making way for twenty-first century Istanbul, a city of different possibilities for travelers and migrants – and their economic negotiations – but still devout about its own traditions, and still with that feeling of going with the tides of the Bosphorus, the eternal ebb and flow of life in a city by the sea.

And then there is the cinema. In the 1950s and 1960s, the city boasted the Yeşilçam district, named after a street in the Beyoğlu neighbourhood that was a home to directors, stars and studios of the country’s industry. In its heyday, Turkey was the fifth-largest film producer worldwide during the 1960s, producing upwards of 250 features a year.

After a decades-long sleep, Turkey is once again one of those rare cinematic cultures that is actually holding its own against imports, and Istanbul has been the beating heart of a thrilling rebirth of Turkish cinema. A new phalanx of filmmakers has been discovered in Zeki Demirkubuz, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Reha Erdem, Semih Kaplanoğlu, İsmail Necmi, Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, Asli Özge and Yesim Ustaoğlu; not to mention Ferzan Ozpetek (Turkish-Italian) and Fatih Akin (Turkish-German), directors so talented they are each proudly claimed by two nations. This group’s works are fuelled by inquiries into identity, memory and loss and seem to flow from a bottomless well of curiosity about the past and a justified fascination (sometimes a dark one) with the future, on both the individual and cultural level. And they all, in individual ways, have called Istanbul home.

Today, Istanbul boasts a dizzying number of film festivals, a vocal independent filmmaking scene and a hunger to make cinema that sees its practitioners equally adept at coaxing slick facilities out of the hands of the thriving local TV dramas as they are shooting guerrilla-style at an abandoned shoe factory. Booms in television and advertising production continue to provide ample day jobs for young graduates of the city’s many university film programmes who may then make their passion projects in the off hours with good access to infrastructure. The city buzzes with cinema, while remaining itself one of the most cinematic environments in the world.

The films selected for this programme begin in the mid-1990s. While the temptation to show works from the Yeşilçam era was strong, the oeuvres of titans like Ömer Kavur or Metin Erksan could themselves take an entire programme; more to the point, there is simply too much newer work to explore. The films in this Festival show the evolving relationship between city and screen since 1994’s Block-C, while a programme of short and avant-garde work attests to the sheer delirious diversity of the cinematic output of this singular city.

See the films in the programme here.

Join us for a panel discussion featuring:

Richard Florida
Author of The Great Reset and Who’s Your City?, director, Martin Prosperity Institute, University of Toronto and founder, Creative Class Group.

Reha Erdem
Director of My Only Sunshine.

Pelin Esmer
Director of 10 to 11.

Seren Yüce
Director of The Majority.

Yeşim Tabak
Film critic.

Moderated by Cameron Bailey and Kate Lawrie Van de Ven.
This panel is free and open to the public and will take place on September 16 at 7pm at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall.