At the recent Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, Amir Ganjavie sat down with Paolo Bertolin, a programmer for the Venice Film Festival.
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): How did you find the festival in general?
Paolo Bertolin (PB): The reason why I come here in invitation that I receive is connected with the Film Forum. This festival is an interesting opportunity for those who are working with Turkish films to know about upcoming projects, to see films in in the stage of working progress, and to meet with people from the industry. I think this is something that is happening more and more with festivals, to try and have an industry component that is permitting local filmmakers to connect with foreign players. Foreign players, meaning potential co-producers, sales agents who might represent films, distributors, of course it’s more unlikely, and festival programmers who might get to know about the films before they’re actually completed. This also relates very much to how the work of programming festivals has changed in the last, let’s say, 5 years or so. Especially when you talk about big festivals like Cannes, Venice, Berlin, we are scouting for films all year round, and trying to be in touch with producers, film institutions, funding bodies, as well as, of course, the filmmakers in order to know what is coming up in the short term, but also in a slightly longer term. You see, I’m here in Antalya. It’s the beginning of October. Our festival in Venice took place just one month ago, but we are already on the lookout for films or projects for next year… Sorry, I speak a lot.
(UM): No, that was very good, very comprehensive. As you mentioned, you’re not here for the festival, but I wonder if you had any chance, in the past maybe, to watch recent Turkish films, and what do you think about the recent trends in Turkish Cinema, especially in terms of when you program them in Venice or other festivals?”
(PB): When I come to festivals in Turkey that have this kind of industry showcases, I sometimes also try to go to the theater and see some films with the local audiences, and this happened specifically yesterday for me, and I really wanted to go and watch the Alper film, Burning Days, in the premiere here because I think it’s very, very interesting sometimes to watch a film that has premiered somewhere in an international festival. In this case, this was a film that premiered in Cannes, and I had seen it before. I even went to the premiere screening in Cannes, but I find it very interesting to see these films that are festival favorites, and that are very well-received internationally, or sometimes not well-received internationally. I find it very interesting to come to the home country and see how local audiences react. Also, because of the language, the reactions might be different. I find it very consistent that local audiences tend to laugh more than festival audiences, like in Cannes. I remember years ago, I watched the Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the Nuri Bilge Ceylan film, and I remember that was a very silent screening.
(UM): Yeah.
(PB): It was a great screening, and everybody was very religiously admiring the masterpiece. And then, I had the chance to see the film again here in Turkey. I don’t remember if it was Antalya or Adana, the other festival that is happening in the fall. It was very interesting for me because, especially in the first half of the film, there was a lot of irony, and the audiences were laughing, I realized that certain lines were meant to trigger laughter. I was like, “Oh, this is so interesting,” and I thought it was a little bit of the same with Burning Days because the whole dialogue, the long dialogue at the orchard in the beginning, when the lawyer and the dentist are talking with the main character, the prosecutor, and they’re talking about this group of women coming to town and this kind of stuff, the audience was really, really laughing at that conversation, and I didn’t realize it was that comic before, and I was, “Okay. Yes, this is really like a comic relief within that specific storyline.” So yes, it is interesting for me to get this pulse sometimes. I mean, I do it with films that I really like, that I want to see how they work with local audiences. But to go back to your question about Turkish films these days, the trends, okay, well, I think the situation is a little bit more complicated than it was a few years back. I don’t know if I can speak politics about the issues that are connected with film financing here. The local production is heavily reliant on funding from the Ministry of Culture, so if certain topics become a little bit more sensitive, it’s more difficult for films that include those topics… I feel that at this very moment, a lot of Turkish films are still, and it’s an important tradition of Turkish Cinema, very much involved with commentary on society. I’m not saying political filmmaking, but at least a filmmaking that is engaged. Strangely enough, despite what is happening with the world, it’s not the main trend these days, let’s put it like that.
(UM): Okay.
(PB): Maybe the fact that the mainstream of Turkish Cinema, not the mainstream in the sense of commercial films, but the mainstream of how Turkish filmmakers approach esthetics and narrative, they are more connected to, let’s say, a classic traditional kind of storytelling. This is something that is less appealing to the main festivals these days. There has been a lot of attention towards narratives that stray away from conventional narratives, so that gives more points to certain kind of aesthetics and narrative strategies, and maybe with most Turkish films, this is not something that has been explored that much, and that’s why even very strong, beautiful films from Turkey are not getting as much exposure internationally as they could have 5 or 10 years ago.
To be honest, I think there are a couple of films here in Antalya that are premiering here in the competition that I’m really surprised that didn’t get a chance to play in some major festivals before, and I can say which ones they are. I think about Mirror, Mirror by Belmin Söylemez because I think that is a very strong, female-centered narrative with a powerful yet subtle statement, not underlying things too much, on the position of women in Turkish Society, even in a context like the one of Istanbul, even in the context of a global Metropolis…Strangely enough, it’s having its work premiere here. Same thing goes for the latest film by Özcan Alper, who is a more experienced filmmaker, whose had films in various international festivals… Black Night is also a powerful film with a strong story centered on the issue of how a conservative community repels those who are different, those who are strangers, or acting in normative ways. That’s a very timely subject as well, and beautifully shot and acted film with a strong center performance. Again, this film also is premiering here, so I guess there are good films being made in Turkey, still quite strong tradition of filmmaking that is relevant, but maybe the international attention is not on this kind of more classic, traditional filmmaking, and that is not helping them getting international visibility.
(UM): That brings me to the questions of programming in the face of diversity. These days, I’m attending many festivals, and I see all of them care about diversity inclusion, and it’s good when we watch this happening. But at some point, you feel that there is no more difference between festivals, Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, even Venice. All are somehow becoming very politicized or they care too much about politics or marginalization, that they want to give voices to different people, and you feel that sometimes they’re becoming the same. When I’m talking with programmers, they know this issue, but sometimes they feel that because of political pressure or because they need to give voice to everyone. So, I’m just curious if you have any thoughts or reflection about this because this might, at some point, make festivals be the same, or not.
(PB): I think you said it all. I don’t know what to add because I think you pinpointed the problem and the situation, the current situation, the potential perspective, but what I probably want to add to this open conversation that we have about diversity, I guess when you talk about diversity, I feel like there are some trends, and the current trend is about the gender agenda, and diversity has been very much connected to the very rightful issue of bringing more women filmmakers to festivals, especially to the big international showcases.
But then I recently presented in a symposium exactly about this topic, and I really wanted to bring a point, and the point was based on data and statistics. If you look at the last 22 years in Cannes, Venice, or Berlin, actually, the number of women has been slowly, but regularly increasing. It’s very small. It goes up and down, but there are definitely more women, and now, programmers are really paying attention to that. Whereas, if you look at the first decade of the 2000s, there were years, especially in Cannes where no less than 3 years when there was not a single woman in the main competition. So now, this would never happen. But at the same time, if you start looking at the factor who are these women, and you’ll realize that almost half of all the women that competed in Cannes in the last 22 years were French. Then, you start thinking, “Oh, okay. Who is this helping? Is it helping women globally or is it helping, maybe again, just a sector or segment of filmmakers who are already may be privileged. If you look at Berlin, “Oh, you had 3 times films from UK directed by women. All of 3 films in question were Sally Potter films. So, I’m just saying that the issue is complicated. It’s complicated by the factor of, “Who are these women? Where are they coming from? Are they always the same?”
Every time a festival announces the line-up, everybody is like, “Oh, there are only four women” or “Oh, good! They did 50%,” but then maybe there are other details that one should go and look because maybe this 50% is only women from the Western World. For instance, there’s not a single woman from Asia, Latin America, or Africa. I’m not blaming the festivals because the truth is also that, because I work with countries like India, if you look at the pool of summations, the number of women in countries like that would be really, really low, so it’s also very complicated to intersect the idea of giving diversity gender-wise, but giving diversity also geography-wise or format-wise because then, what about documentaries? What about animation?
That’s something that makes things much more complicated, and I think things are complicated.
Right now, as I was saying at the beginning, there is a lot of interest, a lot of commitment towards diversity within festivals in regard to gender, but I feel that in the last few years, we have lost a bit of attention about the notion of geographic diversity, and maybe the two things are interconnected because if you want to have more women in festivals, then inevitably, these women may be coming from France or Canada or the Nordic countries, and then maybe you have lost space for films from India or other countries that are not really strong in terms of having gender representation. This is the point that I wanted to bring home about the issue of diversity, that if you’re really committed to diversity, you should look at it from a multi-dimensional perspective, not just one aspect, and look at all the other aspects. And in that regard, for instance, as I was mentioning documentary and animation, for me, diversity is also the formats, like the fact that cinema is not only narrative cinema fiction.
It would be good if festivals were given space to different kind of narratives, and in this sense, I’m talking about, of course, documentaries. We’re talking about animation. There are fantastic animations being made these days, even films that are very daring formally and politically, because animation allows you to tackle subjects in a way that is different and doesn’t tie you to the depiction of the world as it is. So sometimes, I’ve seen a few films this year that were animations, and that were political or historical that were very, very interesting, and I would have really, really thought that they deserve to be more visible, more recognized.
So, yeah. I’m sorry. Again, I spoke a lot, but for me, diversity is a very rich and important source for the work of programmers. You should keep that in mind, but not only from one perspective, only one aspect, but looking at all the potential definitions of diversity because that’s actually what cinema is all about. It’s a very, very shape-shifting kind of art that is going in so many different directions, and it’s an incredibly powerful tool to reflect about the world. So yeah, I feel diversity in cinema is a real asset that would help presenting the world to an audience, and to other people around the world.