The 15th edition of the festival handed out its Golden Bull and Silver Bull awards at a ceremony on Wednesday evening at the Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Culture Center in the eastern Black Sea city of Artvin, which hosted the second leg of the festival from Dec. 11-17, the Anatolia news agency reported on Thursday. Porumboiu’s “Police, Adjective,” the story of an undercover cop in a bleak post-communist small town assigned to conduct surveillance on a teenager, also won the Turkish Film Critics Association (SİYAD) Award at the festival. The film was among the 10 entrants in the festival’s international competition, which also featured two Turkish titles, the documentary “İki Dil Bir Bavul” (On the Way to School), by co-directors Orhan Eskiköy and Özgür Doğan, and youth drama “Bornova Bornova,” directed by İnan Temelkuran.
“On the Way to School,” which follows a newly appointed teacher throughout a school year in a village in southeastern Anatolian as he tries to teach Turkish to primary school students in an ethnically Kurdish village, won the Silver Bull Award at the competition.
Other titles running in the competition included French-Korean filmmaker Ounie Lecomte’s “A Brand New Life,” which follows a little girl abandoned by her father in an orphanage; “Adieu Gary,” the story of a boy who believes his father is Gary Cooper, by France’s Nassim Amaouche; “Castaway on the Moon,” South Korean Lee Hey-jun’s cinematic exploration of contemporary issues such as the economic recession and urban alienation; and Irish Margaret Corkery’s “Eamon,” a dark romantic comedy that follows a family holiday.
The Ankara-based Festival on Wheels, organized by the Ankara Cinema Association with support from the Culture and Tourism Ministry, will now head abroad for its final leg, which runs from Dec. 18-20 in Skopje, Macedonia, featuring a program of largely Turkish films.
