!f Istanbul: The film festival that saved me — Part 1: The Dream

This is Part 1 of 2. I tried to write this as one piece. I couldn’t. Some things deserve more than one sitting.

In February 2002, two 25-year-old women, Serra Ciliv and Pelin Turgut, opened a film festival in Istanbul.

They had no experience running a festival. They had been organizing underground parties — raves, really — under the name OrientNation, bringing together Istanbul’s most audacious cultural figures in unusual venues. When AFM Cinemas, Turkey’s largest theater chain at the time, approached them to create something new, they said yes. The first program guide had a rainbow flag on the cover. The opening film was Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. He came to Istanbul to present it.

Turkey was in the middle of an economic crisis. Unemployment was high, and the currency had collapsed. People told Serra and Pelin that this is not the time. They did it anyway. They named it !f Istanbul Independent International Film Festival (!f İstanbul Bağımsız Filmler Festivali).

The festival sold 30,000 tickets in its first year.

A conservative newspaper ran a headline about the festival’s opening night: “Perverts in the foyer.” The festival kept going.

I didn’t know then that I was watching the best years.

I found !f as a college student in Istanbul, probably around 2007. I had already had my first film festival experience years earlier — a screening of Almodóvar’s Bad Education in my hometown of Adana that I wrote about in my first post here. The same loophole that let me watch that film as a teenager applied here — festival screenings slipped through Turkey’s censorship laws. So !f screened freely.

And what it screened changed everything for the people in those rooms. Benim Çocuğum (My Child), a Turkish documentary about families of LGBTQ+ children navigating acceptance, directed by Can Candan. #DirenAyol (#ResistAyol), directed by Rüzgâr Buşki — the Gezi Park protests and the Pride Parade of 2013, one of the last years the parade would happen freely in Istanbul. And film after film from around the world that simply could not have been seen any other way: Moonlight, Tangerine, Carol, Weekend, Yallah Underground, In the Last Days of the City by Tamer El Said — banned in Egypt, screened freely in Istanbul. Seventeen years of films that arrived like proof of something.

The festival’s queer film program — called Rainbow Films — was the first of its kind in Turkey. It would take the Istanbul Film Festival, the city’s other major film festival, more than a decade to include something similar.

For a queer person of any age in Turkey, !f was not just a film festival. It was proof that another world was possible. That the films existed. That the people who made them existed. That we existed.

I joined the !f team in 2011 — first as a volunteer, then as a programmer and marketing manager. Twelve people, working in two shipping containers welded together in an L-shape atop a parking lot. I wrote, I programmed, I produced videos, I built the social channels, and I did the voiceover for the radio spots (listen to one below, haha). It was the best film school I never enrolled in.

!f team in front of the container office.

Serra and Pelin were my mentors. The kind you’re lucky to have once in a career.

!f was not a submissions festival — except for the Turkish shorts section, which accepted submissions free of charge — we curated everything proactively. No filmmaker has ever paid !f to consider their work. We traveled to festivals across Europe and the SWANA region looking for work that felt like an !f film. We followed filmmakers we’d shown before. We partnered with the Sundance Institute for a screenwriters lab that brought together emerging writers from Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. We knew what films were in development years before they were finished.

The concept of an “!f film” became a real thing — among the team, among audiences, among filmmakers. Serra said it best in an interview: “We are fortunate that many filmmakers also have the concept of a ‘!f film’ in their minds.” It wasn’t a genre. It was a sensibility. Bold, specific, humanist, politically awake, formally adventurous. Not interested in being comfortable. !f didn’t program identities. It programmed dissidence.

Above: !f’s TV spot in 2014, months after Gezi Park protests, a tear gas fuming faceless suit hits baby chicks on the ground, and they keep chanting “it didn’t hurt.” I still dunno how we managed to air this.

!f also built one of the earliest live-streaming programs in festival history. Through a project called !f², the festival simultaneously screened films in Istanbul and in 40+ cities across Turkey and beyond — Yerevan, Tbilisi, Ramallah, Baku, Lefkoşa/Nicosia, Beirut, Aleppo — with live Q&As broadcast from the Istanbul theater to all locations. The infrastructure partner was MUBI, founded by Turkish entrepreneur Efe Çakarel. This was years before the pandemic made hybrid festivals a norm. !f had already figured it out.

By its peak, the festival reached 80,000 to 100,000 attendees annually. It expanded beyond Istanbul — !f Ankara and !f Izmir ran as four-day satellite editions, bringing the festival to audiences who would otherwise never have access to it. Its Twitter account — which we launched out of curiosity and a desire to have fun, not to promote the festival — grew to over 580,000 followers. At one point, !f had more Twitter followers than the Cannes Film Festival. The last time I checked before I quit Twitter, the account still had over half a million followers. Dormant for years. Half a million people are still following it. Waiting, maybe.

The !f Rainbow Party, held midway through each festival, was the second largest LGBTQ+ event in Istanbul after the Pride festivities in June. Every February, we filled the city. Warehouses, clubs, Babylon old and new. It felt like a counter-Istanbul — the city we wanted, for ten days, every winter.

I didn’t know then that I was watching the best years.

Were you an !f person? I’d love to hear your story — drop it in the comments.

— Read Part 2 here. Thank you for being here. and happy Pride!

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