MUBI Blog

The 9th !f Istanbul AFM International Independent Film Festival (www.ifistanbul.com) closed with a radical new experiment designed to take the festival across borders and enable festival films to reach wider audiences across different geographies. Coinciding with Istanbul’s reign as 2010 European Cultural Capital, the project !f2: Live from Istanbul was a ground-breaking initiative designed to take the festival experience to provincial audiences who otherwise have limited or no access to independent and arthouse cinema.

The Auteurs provided secure, top quality online streaming to theatre owners in 12 cities across Turkey, as well as in Cyprus, Gymri (Armenia), Ramallah (Palestine) and Tangiers (Morocco), allowing audiences to watch five much-anticipated festival titles, including the award-winning Un Prophet and Nobody Knows About Persian Cats.

“With the global economic crisis cutting even further into the chances of distribution for alternative content, we believe it is more important than ever to create new channels of communication, collaboration and distribution,” said festival co-director Serra Ciliv. Many of the cities did not have a cinema. Those that did were mostly reliant on mainstream or third run local features. The project’s success was largely due to strong partnerships forged across the many smaller cities of Anatolia and other countries nearby. The other titles that screened the weekend of February 21st were Age of Stupid, Hisham Zaman’s Bawke and Winterland and She, a Chinese. International partners, Celluloid Dreams, Wild Bunch, Norwegian Film Institute, Arts Alliance Media and Films Boutique provided the titles which made this vision possible. At a closing conference on February 21 filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, acclaimed novelist Elif Shafak, Sundance Film Festival senior programmer Caroline Libresco, ARTE general director Jean Rozat, Mexican producer Daniel Birman Ripstein and DJ Spooky discussed the possibilities presented by digital technologies and the internet, as well as its challenges.

What !f² Partners Said

Zeynep Ozbek, Director of Alanya Sinematek Foundation

We are a bunch of movie lovers who have been struggling to fill out this gap since 1994.With !f ² project, we have succesfully reached out to the audience which we have been trying for the last 8 years. This project is a miracle for a city like Alanya where there is very little amount of investments made for arts & culture. Even during Un Prophet, which lasts 154 minutes, the audience hardly moved.

Anber Onar, founder of Sidestreets, Cyprus

Cypriots were thrilled to have this event here and to watch the chosen films with such great quality. The fact that Cyprus is an island already isolates the place from the beginning. But being a part of a whole was very interesting and exciting experience.

Sinan Seyfettinoğlu, director of the Antakya Saklı Ev Culture Cafe

After the screening we had debates with all participants and concluded that the selections showed that people are just like countries, and countries just like people. Nothing is what it appears to be. Antakya loved the event and looking forward to it’s next one.

!f²: Live from Istanbul will keep expanding in the following years across an even wider geography.