Malatya Film Festival makes a good first impression

Malatya is a sleepy Turkish town with an ambitious film festival. But, as the director points out, Cannes is also a small town...

Sofia Coppola's movie Somewhere, starring Elle Fanning, left, and Stephen Dorff, screened at the Malayta International Film Festival, which is in its first year. Focus / Everett / Rex Features

The sleepy Turkish town of Malatya is not at first glance the place one would imagine as the home of an international film festival. On the horizon rises Mount Nemrut, at the top of which is a tomb dating from 62BC.

Yet the collection of statues at the top of the 2,134m mountain takes several hours to reach from the city and so most visitors to the film festival have to find amusement within the confines of the city wall.

Close to the Syrian border, the city itself is fairly nondescript. Most people live in one of the many blocks of flats and the centre of town has a huge collection of stores, including big international brands found in nearly every city in the world.

The fact that one of the main cinemas housing the festival is in a shopping mall only adds to the sense that apart from the hills on the horizon, Malatya does not have much to offer. Food is its big calling card, with the apricot being the symbol of the city.

The film festival is one of the biggest events to have occurred in Malatya and is the brainchild of the governor, Ulvi Saran, who saw the festival as a way of putting the city on the world radar.

Creating a film festival is one of the tried and true tools of tourist boards in cities around the world, so Saran approached Ali Cailsir, the director of the successful Silk Road Festival which usually takes place in Bursa in November.

In accepting the job, Cailsir took the unusual step of moving the Silk Road film festival to April, so as to open up a space in the calendar for Malatya. But despite being the director of both festivals, Cailsir told me: "There is no connection at all between the two festivals, except two events, films for children and screenings for the disabled."

Speaking candidly about the challenges of staging a festival, Cailsir said: "First of all, Malatya is a small city and there has never been an event this big here, so we had some difficulty with the logistics and the transportation because the city is really not ready for something like this. Some of the foundations were even asking: 'Why are you doing a film festival in Malatya?'"

The answer that Cailsir gave shows his own personal ambition and the scope of his vision: "Look at Cannes. It was just a small town when the festival started and now has the biggest festival in the world and the example encouraged us to believe in ourselves, especially as we had success with Bursa, which is a good festival."

Cailsir knew that he needed to make Malatya stand out if it was to be a success. "First of all, beside all the other festivals in the world there are so many in Turkey alone, and so it was important to give the festival an identity, that's why we decided that the theme of the festival should be comedy. It was also a way that we could make sure that the films would be different from other festivals."

The programme of the festival is impressive. I particularly enjoyed Invisible Woman, a French film that deals with identity crisis. Directed by Agathe Teyssier, it stars Julie Depardieu as a young woman who believes she is invisible to her friends and family.

They don't notice her even when she's sitting with them across the dinner table. In a way, it's part of the spate of recent movies in which ordinary folk dress up and pretend to be superheroes. At times Teyssier struggles to develop the plot, and delivery of the message that everyone has to be happy with themselves to be content is occasionally clunky.

Chile is having something of a cinematic boon at the moment and the quirky comedy Optical Illusions has something of the flavour of Aki Kaurismäki. Directed by Cristián Jiménez it's a portmanteau tale set around a shopping mall.

The strongest story involves a young security guard who gets entangled with a shoplifter, and, as with many intertwined tales, the amount of chance and coincidence needed to make the stories work together is occasionally grating.

In addition to those in competition there was a good selection of films that have appeared at other festivals, including the Venice Golden Bear winner Somewhere by Sofia Coppola, the Cannes closing-night film The Tree, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, the Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmie Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done and the intriguing Argentine road accident thriller Carancho, directed by Pablo Trapero.

Another great programming idea was to have a section paying tribute to big names who have died over the past year, which meant that one of my favourite films, The Sweet Smell of Success, starring Tony Curtis, was screened. More than half a century after it was made it remains a good example of the relationship between publicists and journalists.

The successful programme was backed with a good discussion programme that included the Turkish launch of cinema books and lectures on cinema. As first festivals go, it was a soft launch with a low-key atmosphere, but the organisers always knew they had their work cut out. It will be interesting to see how the festival develops.