Editor

The Festival on Wheels first took to the road in 1995... With a mission to present outstanding examples of cinema to film enthusiasts in different cities around Turkey and to introduce Turkish cinema to the rest of the world.

Before the festival wheels were oiled and turning, people’s experience of cinema in the far-flung corners of Turkey was no more than the odd piece of news on television or in the newspaper. In cities without even a movie theatre to speak of, getting to a cinema was a hopeless dream. But wherever the festival set foot, cinemas opened and film after magical film unfolded on screen. And there was soon a loyal and enthusiastic crowd anxiously awaiting the arrival of the festival every autumn; a crowd that spilled out of the four walls of the cinemas.

Naturally, the festival wagon carried more than just films... Directors, actors, writers, film critics and students from every country arrived in the cities too... There were workshops, Q&A sessions, film shoots... Cinema had never been so at one with its audience; art had never embraced everyday life so fully.

For a whole month every year, the Festival on Wheels has visited different cities with the latest fare from world cinema, sections dedicated to masters, new films from Turkey, short film compilations and special screenings raising social and cultural issues through the medium of film... Over the last 14 years, the festival wheels have rolled in and out of the cities of Ankara, Artvin, Baku (Azerbaijan), Bursa, Çanakkale, Drama (Greece), Eskişehir, Gaziantep, Istanbul, Izmir, Kars, Kayseri, Malatya, Mersin, Samsun, Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and T’blisi (Georgia)...

This year the festival’s International Competition was held for the fourth time with a line-up of awards that included First Prize (€10,000), Second Prize (€5000) and the SİYAD (Turkish Association of Film Critics) Prize, as well as the Audience Award, a prize determined by the votes of the public and awarded to a short film screened in the festival.

More on: http://www.festivalonwheels.org