Siirt International Short Film Festival

These days of May are the days of Siirt's traditional City-Egg Festival (Şihr el-bayv), which has been all but forgotten. Kept alive by a tradition hundreds of years old, this festival has recently been celebrated with limited participation, as a kind of commemoration. In other words, there is hardly a festival side to it. A festival is an event in which the whole population of a city pauses the ordinary flow of time and takes part together in a special dimension of time and space. Today festivals and holidays like şihr el-bayv have turned into folkloric memories.

Perhaps this is why there are declines in our understanding of one another, and therefore decreases in our understanding of ourselves, and therefore exhaustions in our compassion for one another...

Thank God that our Ramadan and Eid al-Adha holidays continue every year to re-establish our thousands-of-years-old human connection. Of course these holidays connect us both with the first human in the dimension of time and with every part of the world in the dimension of space, re-establish broken bonds, and repair our disrupted calibrations.

But a city also has holidays of its own, holidays that establish that city's identity and bodily integrity, holidays specific to that city's historical and cultural character. Şihr el-bayv was just such a holiday, and these days not even anyone mentioned it.

The reason even I remembered şihr el-bayv is the International Short Film Festival taking place in Siirt these days. With its enthusiasm peculiar to festivals and its own presentation of time and space, it seemed to have come precisely to remind us that there is a holiday that ought to be celebrated these days.

In a city that has suffered pain, whose holidays even have had heavy cloud shadows pass over them, a significant part of whose youth has left and gone away leaving great pain in their families, a city whose very festivals have been on the verge of dying, with the mourning of the wasted lives that parents cannot even express, a brand-new wind of festival has blown. A wind stirred by the joy of a meeting that came with cinema, that brought film workers together with the people, and that came about as characters immortalized on screens manifested as beings of flesh and bone in the flow of life.

A festival shows it is a festival, of course, through the intense interest and participation it receives from the people. The International Film Festival, held for the first time in Siirt, could not be held at the planned open-air venue, the July 15 Democracy Square, because of the heavy rain that had been falling for a week. Instead it was held in the TÜRGEV hall, packed to its thousand-person capacity, with as many again standing inside, and several times that number outside who tried to get in despite the heavy rain but could not. There was a tremendous desire to take part, not despite the opposition of the weather but despite the sovereignty of the weather. It turns out the city was looking for its festival, that is, in a sense people were looking for one another. This search must be seen and answered.

On the opening day of the festival, Hülya Koçyiğit, Bulut Aras and Erhan Yazıcıoğlu, who is celebrating his 50th year in the arts these days, symbolic names of Turkish cinema, attended and received lifetime honor awards. I think each of them came to Siirt for the first time, and judging by the excitement in the hall when each of their names was mentioned, I think they too found great morale. Birol Güven, Tarkan Karlıdağ, Veli Çelik, Umut Oğuz and many other artists attended. Halil İbrahim Kalaycıoğlu, Zülfikar Ağa of Kurtlar Vadisi, enlivened the Festival from the first day to the last with his folk-song performance on stage, his conversations off stage and his strolling along the streets of Siirt. In the days after the opening, film screenings at Siirt University and cinema workshops and talks with the participation of other artists took place; the jury's evaluation of the 32 that qualified for the final from among the 416 short films entered in the competition also took place, again with intense and enthusiastic participation by students.

The final day of the festival, again with intense participation, was in every respect worth seeing, with the attendance of famous figures such as the valuable director Sinan Çetin and Cengiz Bozkurt and their meetings with the people.

Among the short films that placed, the First Prize was given to Batuhan Köksal for his work "Fabrika", the Second Prize to Cem Özay for his work "Yolcu", and the Third Prize to Osman Çakır for "Korkuluk". In addition, the Siirt Municipality Special Award given within the festival was presented to Özlem Biçici for the short film "Anne".

Fatoş Güney, to whom I personally presented the Lifetime Honor Award, expressed in emotional words the excitement of visiting for the first time the places where the film Sürü, directed by Yılmaz Güney, was shot in 1978.

Every night all the participants became acquainted with an original face of Siirt culture through the "ice cream from the tandır sessions" of Siirt's famous ice cream maker Ayaz Hocaoğlu, who seems to have been born straight off a theater stage. I am sure each of those who lived these moments has felt a desire to come to Siirt again.

Siirt has a strong folklore that could inspire cinema, and marvelous stories waiting to be compiled and utilized. With its multicultural character, with its having hosted ancient civilizations, with its ulema, the stories of great scholars such as İbrahim Hakkı and Fakirullah, Molla Halil, Sheikh Muhammad el-Hazin and Sultan Menduh could each be the source of unique dramas. That of Veysel Karani is a marvelous story, a drama perhaps strong enough to provide a reference for Mother's Day, which we celebrated yesterday. Likewise, the unique story of the teacher-student love between İbrahim Hakkı and his teacher İsmail Fakirullah could very well provide a reference for Teachers' Day. Of course there is also a rich divan tradition, poetry and qasidas, and dengbej culture. These can constitute an important reserve for cinema. Of course there are also the magnificent beauties presented by sociology and nature. There is the Holed Stone, Kayabaşı, and the Botan and Kezer streams winding along among magnificent valleys and canyons.

I congratulate the Ministry of Culture, which gave the strongest support to the Film Festival in Siirt from the start, and especially Deputy Minister Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hüseyin Yayman; Siirt Governor Ali Fuat Atik, who showed generous hosting without recognizing any obstacle or difficulty; Acting Mayor Ceyhun Dilşad Taşkın; Siirt University; and of course my dear friend Baran Meyda, who has been the greatest toiler of this event from the very beginning; and the valuable toilers of the festival's organizer İDE production, Elçin and Mehlika Çelik, for this successful organization.