GEZICI FESTIVAL (28)

Festival start: 01 December 2023      Festival end: 13 December 2023

Celebrating its 28th anniversary in 2023, the Festival on Wheels is a traveling event bringing outstanding films to cinema lovers living outside major cities. New cinemas were opened and films were made in destinations where the Festival has been hosted. The Festival presents the latest films from World Cinema, new films from Turkey, special screenings that raise social and cultural awareness, silent films with live music as well as short films. Additionally, the Festival organizes workshops, Q&As, panel discussions and exhibitions. In the last 27 years, the Festival has visited 24 cities in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, Macedonia and Georgia.

There are no awards in the Festival.

Short films cannot exceed 25 minutes.

All films submitted must be 2022-2023 productions.

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…

In the last 27 years, the Festival on Wheels visited Ankara, Artvin, Baku (Azerbaijan), Bursa, Çanakkale, Diyarbakır, Drama (Greece), Edremit, Eskişehir, Gaziantep, İstanbul, İzmir, Kars, Kastamonu, Kayseri, Malatya, Mersin, Ordu, Samsun, Sarajevo (Bosnia Herzegovina), Sinop, Tbilisi (Georgia), Skopje (Macedonia) and Van. The Festival aims to bring the Turkish and foreign filmmakers together, to realize coproductions. The Festival also works on the commercial distribution and TV broadcast of the films in the program of the Festival.

The festival management also endeavours to secure theatrical release or television sales for films in the festival programme. The Festival on Wheels also puts on a programme of workshops to which it invites a number of filmmakers from Turkey and overseas. In the course of these workshops, the young Turkish filmmakers collaborate with their counterparts from abroad to create cinema together.