Istanbul FakeFest: Some Thoughts on Queer Cinema Through Censorship and Security Concerns

“Hi there, this is the open address of our venue for today’s screenings.” I scroll through the email. There’s a Google Maps link followed by more instructions: “The building entrance is right between the market and the furniture shop; just push the outer door and you’ll be in.” The invite comes with a plea not to share the address on social media or other communication apps. Which explains why I couldn’t find the venue and was forced to ask the festival team for clearer directions; typing the place into Google Maps didn’t yield any results, and the venue’s Instagram page only listed “Istanbul” as its address, without even mentioning which neighbourhood it was in. This wasn’t the only security-related precaution the festival took. All attendees had to fill out a Google Form and provide their names, phone numbers, Instagram handles, and the name of one reference within the local queer community. The applications that were submitted days (if not weeks) prior to the opening night were then vetted by the team, and only after the applicant was verified as being either queer or a safe ally would an email with the screening schedule and venue information be sent. “We’re still checking the applications, please hang in there, the emails will be sent later in the evening!” the festival’s Instagram story promised the evening before kick-off, and voila, my confirmation email arrived in my inbox just a few hours later. 

Now, this process might look excessive for people outside Turkey or the Middle East, but it’s there for a reason – to prevent any problems or dangers experienced in the festival’s past editions. There is only one queer film fest in the entire country of Turkey: Pembe Hayat KuirFest (Pink Life QueerFest), organized by the NGO Pink Life. Founded in 2006 in Ankara, Pink Life started as a trans solidarity organisation. Headquartered in Turkey’s capital city, not far from the parliament, or National Assembly, the NGO has been quite vocal about queer and trans rights, or rather their lack, in Turkish law and policy-making. Pink Life frequently organises events to raise queer and trans visibility in daily life, and has long maintained a close connection with cinema, too. Incidentally, the organisation borrowed its name from Ma Vie En Rose (My Life in Pink, Alain Berliner, 1997), a film following a six-year-old trans girl trying her best to assert her identity in her heteronormative environment. The NGO team eventually reaped the fruits of their efforts in 2011, when they started Pink Life QueerFest in Ankara with sold-out screenings, public support, and overall great success. Yet this positive and welcoming atmosphere didn’t last long, as the Erdoğan government that has ruled over the country since 2003 quickly started to fuel Turkey’s Islamofascist tendencies.

Over the last few years, and especially during the pandemic, the Erdoğan administration started to essentially speedrun banning anything that could be a symbol of a secular lifestyle, specifically targeting queer people. Pink Life QueerFest, for example, used to take place as a touring festival with physical screening events in both Ankara and Istanbul until two years ago, when it was specifically targeted by the Erdoğan-appointed governor of Istanbul, who went on to ban all Pink Life events due to their alleged “disrespecting the local harmony and endangering family values.” Surviving solely through Ankara screenings from that point on, the festival tried to increase accessibility by going digital and making its line-ups available online for a while as well. QueerFest wasn’t the government’s only recent target. In November last year, the inaugural MUBIFest in Istanbul came under fire too. MUBIFest wanted to show Luca Guadagnino’s Queer (2024) as the opening film, and while all the government bodies initially approved the choice, the governor, once again, issued a  ban on the screening just hours before the event, at which point MUBI Turkey retaliated by cancelling the festival altogether, a decision that was supported by many secular-leaning industry professionals and institutions, among them QueerFest. 

This dark winter rages on, though, as the Erdoğan administration declared 2025 the “year of family”, and on March 19, the President himself ordered the arrest of Ekrem Imamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor affiliated with the main secular opposition party and presidential candidate, on allegations of bribery, terrorism, and more. With no evidence to be found, the allegations led nowhere, yet Imamoğlu is still in jail. This was the catalyst that prompted marginalised and young people to protest all around the country. Soon enough, white-collar workers also realised their influence on the economy, and long boycott lists started to circulate on social media. People began to hold companies and industry stakeholders accountable – are you supporting a just and free country, or not? It was in those turbulent days that the Istanbul Film Festival quietly cancelled their queer-only section, “Nerdesin Aşkım? (Where Are You My Love?)”, issuing a dubious explanation only after many accused the festival of silencing queer people and topics in such troubled times. “There weren’t enough “high quality” queer films produced this year that we could programme,” the statement read, “and we didn’t silence anyone, we already have four other queer-themed films included across the festival line-up.” Audiences were quick to catch on to the IFF team’s nonchalant dismissal of the issue’s severity, and so was Pink Life QueerFest, which used the opportunity to declare a self-proclaimed “emergency landing” in Istanbul and organise Istanbul KürFest: Buradayız Aşkım (Istanbul FakeFest: We Are Here My Love), on April 11-13 2025.

While the festival technically lasted just three days, films were only screened on two of those. April 13, the last day, hosted several events like a collage workshop and a roundtable centred on queer representations in cinema. One of the events, taking place in a gallery, also included an impromptu camp ritual: a voodoo session on the Istanbul Film Festival to avenge the axing of its queer sidebar, as documented on the QueerFest’s Instagram stories: “We did some voodoo on IFF,” a smiling face with glasses emoji cheekily noted, with people laughing and hitting the puppet while dancing around.

A “voodoo ritual” performed on IFF, as documented on QueerFest’s Instagram page

And now, flashback to the early evening of April 11, the first day of Istanbul FakeFest. I’m in front of the screening venue’s building; the entrance is indeed sandwiched between a market and a furniture shop. I push the heavy door open and find myself in a small, barely lit lobby-like area with a tiny elevator and an even tinier staircase next to it. I wonder if this is in fact just a residential building. What’s up with the location? I check the email with the venue address; yes, I’m in the right building and floor. Then, I see the door with a rainbow sticker on it. The venue’s symbol comes with a short sentence: “Knock the door and say, ‘Hey, I’m here now!’”  I come closer and hear laughter from inside the flat. After knocking on the door several times, I hear a faint “Wait, my love, someone’s here!” and am finally welcomed inside. I’m immediately surrounded by a dim yellow light, some light house music, and people chatting everywhere around me. This is really just a regular flat, repurposed as a screening venue with the living room emptied out to host a projector, a few chairs, and some beanbags. I walk across the room to find a spot to sit and notice some desks flanking the wall with several brochures laid out. It’s an eclectic collection: old QueerFest pamphlets, some educational leaflets on queer and trans issues, and a few English-language ones on various queer topics. The audience was just 30 people, and those not fast enough to grab a chair or beanbag simply laid on the carpeted floor to watch the film while sipping some herbal tea or coffee. It felt more like a group of close friends coming together for an impromptu watch party than an official festival screening. After killing the lights and refilling the mugs, the fest began with its opening film: BELLEKVARİ (MEMORY–LIKE, Asya Leman and Çağrı Sumru, 2024).

BELLEKVARİ (MEMORY-LIKE)

Created by prominent members of the local queer community Asya Leman and Çağrı Sumru, who wore many (maybe too many) hats directing/shooting/editing/etc the film, MEMORY–LIKE is a 70-minute oral history of QueerFest, featuring many talking-head interviews with its organisers and carefully selected archival footage documenting every step of the festival’s evolution since its ideation in the early 2000s. The footage of QueerFest’s very first edition in 2011 was tragically hopeful: a sold-out opening night at a mainstream film theatre, diplomats of the few embassies that provided funding for the festival in attendance, pretty dolls with high heels chatting happily, huge banners and posters of the event all around… None of that survives today. Per a fun anecdote relayed by an interviewee, the theatre’s “honorary guests” seats were taken by local sex workers, and while the dignitaries who were going to sit there looked displeased, they still shrugged the thing off: “Oh, sure, that’s how it should’ve been anyway, have a great evening.” The rest of the documentary addresses the many difficulties endured by the festival team over the years, be it censorship or funding problems, and the increased security risks as attacks on queer people become more prominent every day. Another interviewee mentions hearing from the local queer elders how everyone used to be “underground” when these flashy all-out events were not the norm. The mood changes, and everyone’s eyes tear up with sadness: “I hope we’ll relive that first edition’s opening night one day,” someone says. People sigh and express their hopes for the festival to go on, to get bigger, to go back to travelling the country, and to do more.

Queen’s Illusion

Among the few festival screenings was a short film section consisting of local films from Turkey. The lineup featured documentaries as well as fiction films, from both experienced directors and film students, and three of them caught my attention. Co-directed by Ceren Özkanlı Samlı and Erinç Durlanık, Kraliçenin İllüzyonu (Queen’s Illusion, 2024) is a 20-minute documentary on drag queens and their experiences in Turkey. The short features beautifully shot sequences of the queens getting ready for their events or performing their art, with frequent cuts to talking-head segments with them. The directors ask no questions, leaving the queens to freely and more intimately share their thoughts. The editing and close-ups, along with the film’s warm palette, truly invoke that feeling of chatting with close friends on a random day over coffee. While some queens focus more on their personal experiences, such as discovering Drag Race on a random night on YouTube or trying to apply eyeliner for the first time, others directly comment on the societal issues in Turkey without mincing their words. In the first talking-head sequence, we see Pepi IV, a queen with an ‘80s influence over her dress and jewellery, fixing her fluffy blond wig. “I don’t think this documentary will change anything or advance Turkish society,” she muses, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think so. This documentary will work in Europe. They will say, ‘See, there are trans people in a third world country.’” 

As a Turkish queer myself, I can’t help but agree with that statement, though I remain skeptical. Istanbul FakeFest took place in April, and I’m penning this article about a month later. During that period, only local and some niche national Turkish outlets reported on the festival; some even wrote about the festival’s previous several bans as well. However, I could find no international outlet reporting on any of these. It’s true that making or watching these documentaries barely changes anything for the better in Turkey, but I highly doubt we have any real effect in Europe beyond mere performativism either. Another drag queen also highlighted similar issues. Cake Mosq lounges on a sofa shortly after taking off her make-up, and she mentions some Turkish divas from the ‘70s: Zeki Müren and Bülent Ersoy. The former is a pop star with a highly effeminate and flamboyant style, a gay man as an open secret; the latter a trans singer with countless hits under her belt who eventually sided with the Erdoğan government. Cake Mosq says that she doesn’t blame the two divas for never openly acknowledging their queer identities or showing any efforts to advance queer and trans rights. After all, she adds, “Everyone has to fight the political actors of their own era.” As Pepi IV puts it, Turkey is a very “hypocritical” country, where things can only pass in the public’s eye as long as a harmless illusion is maintained.      

The other standout short documentary was set in Izmir, a coastal city in Western Turkey by the Aegean Sea. Dönüşüm: Bornova Sokağı (Transformation: Bornova Street, Aycan Karadağ and İbrahim Kucuş, 2024) focuses on the history and gentrification of Izmir’s Bornova Street, a place known for its rich multicultural history. The short is quite intersectional: all along Bornova Street, we see trans people living next to minorities like Levantines who have called the place their home for several generations, as well as working-class tradesmen conducting business on the same turf. About five minutes in, a local Levantine senior reminisces about the old Bornova: “People on the run, marginalised by society, settle in places where they can be accepted without being excluded. And Bornova Street became such.” Karadağ and Kucuş cut to a trans woman, Ani, walking through the street at night, twirling her hair. Ani says she noticed a high population of trans women in the area in the ‘90s and ‘00s. However, the tone quickly shifts with the mention of Azra Has. A fellow trans woman, Has was brutally murdered on this street in 2010, around the time the Erdoğan government started to aggressively scale up its authoritarian rule in the country. Among the trans community, Bornova became known as and renamed Azra Has Street after her passing. The film then cuts between some of its trans and cis residents. The latter blame the former for being “scary and problematic” and want to prevent trans people from “being too visible” on the street. Tragically enough, during the next talking-head segment, the interview comes to a halt once some loud death threats at the local queers suddenly echo offscreen. The cameraperson gets up to film the street from a window, as the frame shakes intensely. The interviewee then notes they saw people attacking trans women with glass bottles just the day before. Which party is the “scary and problematic” one here? 

Rememberings

Rememberings (2024) marks the directorial debut of emerging filmmaker Melisa Kenanoğlu. The student narrative short hinges on a singular premise, at least for Turkish cinema: a young girl falling in love with her friend’s mother. Unconvincing as the acting sometimes feels, especially the most dramatic sequences, the overall level of filmmaking is quite high, all the more so for a student film. While teen protagonist Bade (Dilara Yılmaz) grapples with her feelings for Yeşim (Esra Ronabar), her friend’s beautiful mother, the claustrophobic close-ups and cold colour grading turn the girl’s world into a truly suffocating milieu. During a visit to her friend’s home, Bade steals one of Yeşim’s earrings from the bathroom, and while this causes a rift in her friend’s relationship, Yeşim doesn’t scold her. Instead, she encourages the teen to keep the piece of jewelry, and in the closing shot, we see Bade wearing that lonely earring while sporting red lipstick the way Yeşim did. Eventually, Bade grows up as she comes to terms with her love and femininity, and this positive ending is crucial for queer representation, especially in Turkey.

As the Q&A for MEMORY–LIKE wrapped, the festival team started to quickly gather their MacBooks and other items while inviting the audience to leave the venue. “We need to clear out by 9, sorry, it’s just how it is here, feel free to continue the discussion while taking the stairs, though!” For a few minutes, the building’s only staircase hosted the liveliest trail of people as we all climbed down six floors. I was in front of the line, so I got to open the outer gate and be the first to feel the cold wind on my face. A few people stopped for a quick cigarette break, but almost everyone quietly fanned out in all directions. Soon enough, I was walking alone to the subway. I found myself thinking about how we could be out in public more freely even just a few years ago compared to our situation now, and then remembered how queer elders mentioned “going underground” in MEMORY–LIKE. Maybe time is nothing but a loop, and hopefully we’ll get to treat ourselves again to red carpets as in the first edition of the Pink Life QueerFest during brighter, warmer days for Turkey. In the meantime, I’ll hibernate through this windy winter.  

İstanbul KürFest: Buradayız Aşkım (Istanbul FakeFest: We Are Here My Love)
11-13 April 2025
https://www.pembehayatkuirfest.org/