A good friend, Adnan, shot a documentary in Afghanistan recently and entered his film, Opium Dreams (http://www.arkmedia.ca/intro.swf) into the Antalya (Turkey) Golden Orange Film Festival. A group of us went down to Antalya, southern Turkey, to support Adnan in this important time for him.
We stayed at the hotel where Adnan & Sibel were staying, The Sea Life Hotel (http://www.sealiferesorthotel.com/en/indexen.html). Without going into any detail I can thouroughly recommend NOT STAYING AT THIS HOTEL unless you are looking for the complete refugee holiday package. I have had my own back on this establishment by various online hotel reviews.
On the surface, the organisation of the festival appeared to be excellent with free shuttle service / limousine service to whatever location you wanted. There were complimentary gala dinners and partys thrown at the most ostentatious of venues I could have imagined. If you could pallate the pretentious and most vacuous of persons then you were in the right place!
We teamed up with Adnan, Sibel, Thomas, Bashir and Dirk to make the most of the four days that we were presented with. After the average two hours of sleep after an evening's innings we would have breakfast, lay on the beach, go for lunch, back to the beach, followed by sauna and massage in preparation for the new evening's fothcoming fun and frivolities.
The results for Adnan, let alone the rest of the documentary category were extremely disappointing. The festival organisers, in what the Turkish film industry concedes was a political decision, cancelled the documentary category and any prize associated with winning.
I can say that Adnan's film was excellent, some of Turkey's top director's had previewed the film and given excellent feedback to him. He wasn't expecting to win the documentary category but he wasn't expecting a ridiculous outcome such that happened.
The interesting thing is that the films were all reviewed for their acceptability prior to being allowed to participate. The final decision of the judges, whom we can't understand what qualifications facilitated their judging, was an insult to the screening judges prior to the event. Secondly, some of the films were previously part of the Cannes Film Festival receiving much acclaim.
The judges' final decision not only hurt the image of Turkey's up and coming film talent, it has also wounded the international image of the whole Antalya film festival itself. All I can say is that I am glad I didn't have to pay to be robbed of my time to see the films that were award recipients.
One thing that can be said about the film festival is that the outcomes were consistent with expectations of Turkey's 'Professional Organisations'.
