opening night of the istanbul film festival

To pick up exactly where I left in my last entry:
First we got on the tram to Kabatas and took a taksi which let us out near ‘the open air theatre’ which in theory is sort of the back door of where we were thrying to reach since by claming a set of stairs you get there. However in practice the stairs were closed due to some sort of construction going on god knows what. Istanbul is a city of perpetual construction especially pavements and roads keep being constructed all over again (it is NOT maintenance it is destructing the whole thing and rebuilding from scratch every year) which meant, with a great many people who thought they were being street wise by taking the back door, we had to walk the entire bloc to reach the front entrance, thank god I don’t wear high heels like many of our fellow commuters had done.
Anyway the press with their cameras were lining the entrance and we made a dive inside. The first person we saw was the head of the film festival Azize who of course is also the hostess of the event. She was wearing this beige lace affair and looked surprisingly fresh for someone who must been living a hectic life that was about to get worse.
Then we saw Selim who is a member of the grand jury this year and also has an exhibition within the festival whose opening was the next day and which I hope will be able to relate as well. We had to go inside pretty quickly since unlike Selim and a happy few our seats had no numbers and we had to find a place to sit if we hoped to see anything on stage. We managed to find a place at the middle though quite up at the back.
We saw Ozelm and Didem whom I know since I was a kid from Aktur Bodrum the place I used to spend all my summers when I was a kid. Many, many years later Ozlem became a MA student of mine. Didem is her sister and I saw that she was very pregnant. Since the baby was going to be a Gemini we chatted about this sign. Ozlem said Didem should have known better since their mom was a Gemini and I said I understand them completely since mine is too. Never pass an opportunity to complain about your mother is my motto even if it is only through horoscope signs.
Then I saw Muge who is the owner of a prestigious publishing house: Metis who had come with Fatmagul a famous feminist scholar. I saw Ertan who is a journalist I know from when I used to work for Radical, a daily leftish newspaper and whom nowadays almost single-handedly does all the work of the arts page including a gossip column. True to form he asked me if it was true that I was scripting a new “law” for film critics to adhere to and I answered in the affirmative by displaying my surprise that he had heard.
Then the ‘event’ itself started. It is not much of an event really. I mean it surprisingly resembles our very own SIYAD awards with Eczacibasi, the patron of art whose money sponsors the entire festival, replacing Atilla Dorsay, the doyen of film critics in Turkey. There is the life time achievement awards, there is the photos of the prominent cinema people who died the previous year, there is the music etc. The structure is the same.
I wonder what will happen when our great Yesilcam (Turkish Hollywood although this is a thing of the past here that no longer exists) stars all die out. These are the people that get the life time achievement awards and bring a touch of sparkle to these events, there is not a single actor that is even remotely comparable to them in star quality. In this particular instance the awards were given by Turkan Soray to Ekrem Bora, Ediz Hun and Izzet Gunay. And one last award was given to Claudia Cardinale. In short the event was a rhapsody of nostalgia and I suspect this is to please Eczacibasi who seems to be inviting all the old stars of his youth in a row each year.
Then there was a break before the opening film and we went outside having no intention of returning. The place is not a film theatre and does not provide the best viewing conditions. Plus we were hungry as it happens in these events that start too early to eat and end too late to eat.
And that’s when the socialising started. We saw Umit, a director friend who also happens to be Gencay’s ex boyfriend. We saw Selen an actress and singer friend of ours, who desperately wants to be a star. We saw Bige who looked like a star. We saw Hasmet, my only friend from university that I am still friends with whose documentary film will be screened at the festival, we saw Nilgun, a journalist friend I know from back when I used to work at Cumhuriyet. We saw Gulum, an ex student who works at the festival but is actually a good actress that has yet to make a break. We saw Ovgu, a fellow film critic and scholar. We saw Volga an ex-student who turned out to be quite a character actor. We saw Ferhat another ex-student who is about to move to Japan and become a father, not necessarily in that order.
Then we made a decision worthy of applause and decided to join Bige and Banu who were going to have dinner at Borsa restaurant, a very fancy meat restaurant, which is under the same roof as Lutfu Kirdar. All the award winners and jury members and what not were also going there for the festival’s official dinner, so not only the food but also the ‘view’, was quite good. Banu and Bige were wonderful dinner companions and we ended up having a much better time then we had bargained for. After dinner there were two parties to pick and choose from: the festival party at Karakoy Liman, would have all the celebrities but would be suitably boring and then there was the gay party for the exhibition at Tonic which would be fun since, let’s admit it, gays know how to party better than anyone. But then we had each other, Seda and I, and we were already content and entertained and much preferred to go home for a little private entertaining of our own.