About the Festival

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 23 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.