During the Karlovy Vary film festival, just completed, Dr. Ahmet Boyacioglu,
founder of "The European Festival on Wheels" in Turkey, announced that this
year the festival will for the first time be extended beyond the borders of
Turkey itself. The home base of the festival is Ankara and regular stops along the way usually include Bursa, Izmir and other inland cities. This year the festival will open in Ankara then move all the way across the isthmus to Kars in extreme eastern Turkey near the border with Georgia and Armenia. After a week in Kars (November 10 -- 16), the festival will then cross the border into Georgia and set up camp in the Georgian capitol, Tbilisi. There is also an outside possibility, says Dr. Boyacioglu, that the festival will be even further extended this year to Baku in Azerbaidjan.

This would be a logical extension as the official language of Azerbaidjan
is a variety of Turkish not too distant from the Anatolian variety. The
Azerbaidjanian connection has yet to verified but Tbilisi is in the bag. A
little more oomph and we may be calling this the "Magic Carpet Film Festival".

Can you imagine a festival on wheels, presenting 80-90 films while travelling 3000-4000 kilometers ? The Festival of European Films was first organized in 1995 to present outstanding Turkish and European films to the film lovers in various cities of Turkey beyond the Istanbul Pale. Being a member of the European Coordination of Film Festivals, the festival visits different cities to present its program during four weeks in the fall of every year.

CONFIRMED DATES SO FAR
ANKARA 03 - 09 November 2006
KARS 10 - 16 November 2006
TBILISI 17 - 21 November 2006

ALEX DELEON, PRAGUE
Reporting, July 12, 2006