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Istanbul Film Festival unveils line-up and Meetings On The Bridge details.

The İstanbul Film Festival (April 5-15) has unveiled the programme for its 36th edition.

Scroll down for lineups

Despite intensive political campaigning ahead of the Turkish constitutional referendum on April 16 and an ongoing state of emergency in the country following last year’s July putsch, festival director Kerem Ayan revealed the line-up at a relatively relaxed press conference in Istanbul.

The festival will host a total of 203 films in 21 categories from 61 countries in nine venues on both sides of the Bosphorous. Among those are 13 Turkish features getting their world premieres.

Among films to compete in the international competition are Toronto hit Lady Macbeth and French immigration drama This is Our Land.

While the number of international guests set to attend the festival is expected to be down on previous years due to a series of terror attacks in the city, notable guests...

Istanbul Film Festival unveils line-up and Meetings On The Bridge details.

The İstanbul Film Festival (April 5-15) has unveiled the programme for its 36th edition.

Scroll down for lineups

Despite intensive political campaigning ahead of the Turkish constitutional referendum on April 16 and an ongoing state of emergency in the country following last year’s July putsch, festival director Kerem Ayan revealed the line-up at a relatively relaxed press conference in Istanbul.

The festival will host a total of 203 films in 21 categories from 61 countries in nine venues on both sides of the Bosphorous. Among those are 13 Turkish features getting their world premieres.

Among films to compete in the international competition are Toronto hit Lady Macbeth and French immigration drama This is Our Land.

While the number of international guests set to attend the festival is expected to be down on previous years due to a series of terror attacks in the city, notable guests...

Whereas westerns reflect a longing for a vanished past, Turkish cinema is examining and lamenting modernisation as it happens

By the time Sergio Leone got to Monument Valley in 1968 to film exteriors for Once Upon a Time in the West, its sandstone buttes – engrained in the popular consciousness by their presence in John Ford's westerns – had already assumed the hulking mythic grandeur the great Italian director needed for his story of American beginnings. Nuri Bilge Ceylan was surely hoping for a little of the same when he had his night convoy of murder investigators sweep their headlights across the vast prairie in last year's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. The auburn-grey hills around Keskin, near the capital Ankara, might not be as singular a location as the Utah valley, but they've got their own mute, unknowable magnificence – a suitable backdrop for Ceylan's gloomy night of the Turkish soul.

★★★☆☆ From visionary director Reha Erdem (Times and Winds, Kosmos) comes Jîn (2013), an environmental parable that uses the bitter Turkish-Kurdish conflict as a universal metaphor for the destructive disposition of humanity upon a frail and delicate natural world. Narratively influenced by the tender storytelling of fairy tales, Jîn feels like a contemporary adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood, with the film's titular protagonist (played brilliantly by Deniz Hasgüler) materialising transcendentally from behind the camouflage of the Turkish woodlands - complete with her red headscarf and surrounded by the serene beauty of nature.

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Rightly lauded by Sight & Sound, Time Out and yours truly, Reha Erdem's unique and challenging Turkish romance Kosmos (2010) is now available to own on DVD courtesy of UK distributor Verve Pictures. To celebrate this release, we've kindly been given Three DVD copies of the film to give away to our world cinema-obsessed readers. This is an exclusive competition for our Facebook and Twitter fans, so if you haven't already, 'Like' us at facebook.com/CineVueUK or follow us @CineVue before answering the question below.

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Rock Of Ages (12A)

(Adam Shankman, 2012, Us) Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones. 123 mins

Doing for 1980s hair metal what Mamma Mia! did for Abba, this glossy musical gives you the broad pleasures of pantomime rather than rock'n'roll danger, with theatrical star turns and a playlist of power ballads hung around an archetypal tale of a smalltown girl and a wannabe rock star boy on La's Sunset Strip. You can stop believin' now.

Cosmopolis (15)

(David Cronenberg, 2012, Fra/Can/Por/Ita) Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon. 109 mins

Don De Lillo's prescient novella makes for a cool Manhattan odyssey, centred on Pattinson's jaded banker and the Occupy zeitgeist.

Polisse (15)

(Maïwenn, 2011, Fra) Karin Viard, Joey Starr, Marina Foïs. 128 mins

A Wire-like approach to a French child protection unit reaps dividends for this docu-style procedural.

Red Lights (15)

(Rodrigo Cortés, 2012, Us/Spa) Cillian Murphy, Robert De Niro,...

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Beautiful, lingering shots of forbidding snow-topped expanses have become a facet so typical of European “art-house” fare that we might as well just call it the cliché that it is. With curious characters and an involving story, such locales can enhance a sense of isolation and dread, yet when dispassionately employed amid a filmmaker’s confused vision, it can often leaven befuddling results. Such is true of Kosmos, the unfortunate latest feature from Time and Winds director Reha Erdem.

The first sight in Kosmos is of a man, panic-stricken and running away, struggling to catch his breath. He rescues a young boy who has fallen into an icy river, and the boy’s endlessly grateful father quickly asserts that the man, Kosmos (Sermet Yesil) must have been sent from God. While this seems oddly plausible from the outset – and Kosmos is warmly received by the citizens of Kars,...

I'm not sure how to approach writer-director Reha Erdem's mystical drama Kosmos. There are layers of culture and faith embedded within this film that defy access even for a critical viewer. It is--i'm presuming here, having been exposed to very little cinema from that country--an expression of Turkish identity, the shared Muslim faith in that country, and the long-standing regional conflicts afflicting that country. It's long been my belief that there's a contract between viewer and filmmaker to try to meet each other somewhere in the vast gulf between one another, and I'm unprepared to say if my failure to "get" Kosmos is a flaw in me as a viewer or a flaw in Erdem the filmmaker. I can say that the film creates an...

Reha Erdem's brilliant Kosmos is strange in a way few films beyond experimental cinema ever manage to be. The story of a visitor to a lonely, insular Turkish city and how the people there react to him, it's not merely that it's one of those movies where nothing makes much logical sense or that it tackles very highbrow themes without a shred of irony. Above all else it never seems particularly interested in explaining itself, never throwing the audience more than a cursory bone to help them understand what's going on.

The stunning cinematography makes it obvious pretty early on there's more to Erdem's film than empty arthouse posturing, and there are enough moments of wonder dotted throughout the running time to keep reinforcing that idea, but even the most patient viewer will probably wonder at some point whether it's worth sitting through the whole thing.

Yet persevere until the home stretch,...

Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Sitges 2010:

Exorcisms, Vampires, Zombies, Martial Arts And Liters Of Blood At Sitges 2010

The 43rd Sitges - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, that will take place from 7 to 17 October, presents its lineup, with some films still to be confirmed, for the following sections:

Sitges 43 Official FANTÀSTIC Selection - In Competition

The official selection par excellence will be offering a lineup emphasizing a variety of nationalities (Bulgaria, Japan, France, Swede, Uruguay,...), the impact of new South American cinema, the rebirth of oriental cinema and the mixture of supernatural horror movies with exorcisms, vampires and mutants and everyday horror with real extreme violence.

13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, Japan)

14 Days With Victor (Román Parrado, Spain)

A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop (Zhang Yimou, China, Hong Kong)

Bedevilled (Jang Cheol-soo, South Korea)

Black Death (Christopher Smith, Germany)

La Casa Muda (Gustavo Hernández, Uruguay)

Confessions (Tetsuya Nakashima,...

If I had the holiday time left, I’d be booking a trip to España right about now. The 43rd annual Sitges kicks off on October 7th and their line up so far is impressive. Damned impressive.

In competition are Gregg Araki’s Kaboom (teaser, stills), Christopher Smith’s Black Death (review), Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports (trailer), Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber (clip) and Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins among many others. In competition in the Panorama section are another great set of films including Shion Sono’s Cold Fish (trailer), Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage (trailer), Jim Mickle’s Stake Land (trailer) and Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film (review).

If those titles aren’t enough, there’s loads more including Rob Stefaniuk’s vampire musical road trip film Suck (review, trailer), James Wan’s Insidious (clip), Adam Green’s Frozen (trailer), Black Lightning (trailer), Super (clip), The Vanishing on 7th...

It's been called the Cannes of genre cinema an the first wave of programming has been announced for Sitges 2010, a lineup featuring the best in genre film of all types from all around the globe. Here's the full announcement!

The Shining celebrates its 30th anniversary and the 43rd Sitges - International Fantasy Film Festival of Catalonia, that will take place from 7 to 17 October, would like pay homage to it through the image for this year's official poster. The Shining (1980), by Stanley Kubrick, is one of the few undoubtedly classic horror films that still holds up with the passage of time, going beyond the genre and the director himself.

The Festival will also be remembering the 25th anniversary of Back to the Future by Robert Zemeckis, offer a special tribute to the deceased Paul Naschy with the screening of the documentary El hombre que vio llorar a Frankenstein, and will be...

Above: the first Golden Donkey winner, Reha Erdem's Kosmos (2009).

Little did the Ferroni Brigade anticipate the earth-shattering importance of the date, as it happily embarked towards the Sala Volpi (also affectionately known as "the basement boiler room") on that warm evening of the opening of the Venice film festival 2004. Not that we—that is, the soon-to-be founding members and Other First Secretaries of the Central Committee of the Ferroni Brigade, Olaf Möller and Christoph Huber—weren't in a good mood: After all, we (almost) always rush to the cinema in hopes of being delighted and educated. And certainly the screening in the retrospective dedicated to the "Secret History of Italian Cinema" looked a lot more pleasurable than suffering again through Steven Spielberg's interminable The Terminal, which unspooled in the nearby Sala Grande, while we walked past our favorite festival usher (the "Centurio"), entered the shabby, but charming small...

When Hungary's Gyorgi Palfi appeared on the international film scene with 2002's Hukkle writers were left straining to find the words to describe his very odd creation.  In his best moments Palfi is a curious fusion a raw, visceral realism and a sort of playful sense of fantasy and the unique combination of the two gives his work a strange power.

Enter Turkey's Reha Erdem.  Soon to take a bow in Berlin with Kosmos - a film Erdem wrote, directed and edited - I expect Erdem will provoke the same reactions.  There's a sense of real world fantasy to this that is rare in the extreme, the sense that actual people might actually be able to free themselves from gravity and achieve any sort of thing they desire. But fused to that there is also a sense of mortality, a down in the dirt understanding of humanity and the world we live in.

  Berlin -- Brit director Mat Whitecross, who shook up the Berlin film festival with his last two documentaries, "The Shock Doctrine" (2009) and "Road to Guantanamo" (2006) is returning this year with "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll," a biopic of British punk icon Ian Dury starring Andy Serkis.

"Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll" is certain to be one of the highlights of this year's Panorama lineup, which was announced Friday.

Other returning veterans include French filmmakers Jacques Martineau and Olivier Ducastel, whose new drama "Family Tree" will have its world premiere in Berlin; Hong Kong helmer Skud, coming to town with "Amphetamine" and Austrian director Peter Kern, whose "Initiation" looks at the relationship between an octogenarian and a 16-year-old boy.

Art and gay cinema have always had pride of place at the Panorama, and are well represented in the 2010 lineup. Panorama's non-fiction section, the Dokumente, includes "Waste Land," Lucy Walker's portrait of artist...

The title for Nuri Bilge Ceylan's next project is: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. The leading role will be assigned to Yilmaz Erdogan, a famous Turkish writer, director and actor. Erdogan is best known by his box-office winner films like Vizontele, Magic Carpet Ride, Neseli Hayat. It was a surprise selection on Ceylan's part to choose Erdogan, who also happens to be a popular figure on local television. Taking place in the p.m. portion of the day, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia follows the life of a doctor and a prosecutor. Both Ceylan and Erdogan aren't releasing any further details for now, but we'll update the status of the project in 2010. - Our Turkish film correspondent Onur Ertugrul is back with us with some great news on the next project for one of the decades' best auteurs. Turkish Film Scene – Local: Latest Film Of Zek...