Visibility on the Move: The International Filmmor Women's Film Festival on Wheels

Toy Par A.

Invisible NECS 2026, Montpellier, Fransa, 18 - 20 Haziran 2026, (Yayınlanmadı)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Yayınlanmadı
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Montpellier
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Fransa
  • Galatasaray Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

The structural invisibility of women in the Turkish film industry is not limited to production and distribution but is also evident within the film festival ecosystem. Emerging within the feminist cultural activism that intensified in Turkey in the 1980s, women’s film festivals have developed as alternative visibility strategies addressing the historical and institutional blind spots of mainstream and generalist festivals. Today, there are three international women’s film festivals in Turkey, two of which were founded in the late 1990s, a period marked by the revival of national film industry, Turkey’s membership in Eurimages, and the increasing international circulation of independent cinema.

This paper examines the position of women’s film festivals within the Turkish festival ecosystem, with a particular focus on Filmmor. It explores issues of visibility, sustainability, funding models, and institutional positioning within the national festival landscape. For many years, Filmmor sustained its activities through national and international funding schemes, cultural cooperation mechanisms, and consular support. Its itinerant structure enabled the festival to circulate women’s films across different cities while fostering a sense of community among filmmakers and audiences beyond established festival centres. In recent years, however, the contraction of the cultural sector and increasing difficulties in accessing funding have exposed the structural fragility of such festivals.

 

This paper approaches women’s film festivals as sites of strategic over-representation for women directors and women’s narratives, while questioning why this visibility has struggled to translate into lasting structural transformation within mainstream festival institutions and cultural policies. By focusing on Filmmor, it examines the spatial, institutional, and economic conditions under which alternative forms of visibility are produced and sustained, and shows how women’s film festivals, despite their strong potential to counter invisibility, are repeatedly pushed into fragile and marginal positions within unequal regimes of funding and recognition shaping the festival ecosystem in Turkey.

 

Keywords: Women films festivals, Filmmor, funding regimes, film festival ecosystems in Turkey

 

References

Carocci, E. (2016). A counterpublic sphere? Women’s film festivals and the case of Films de Femmes. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 23(4), 447-453. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506816665726 (Original work published 2016)

Olibet, Y. (2024). ‘Make it look a little like a festival’: Film exhibition and festival organizing at Films Femmes Méditerranée during the COVID-19 pandemic. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 31(3), 354-374. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505068241280525 (Original work published 2024)

Haydari, N. (2020). International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels: “Women’s Cinema, Women’s Resistance, Cinema of Resistance”. In: Sezen, D., Çiçekoğlu, F., Tunç, A., Thwaites Diken, E. (eds) Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_14

Ehrich, M.E., Burgdorf, K., Samoilova, Z. et al. The film festival sector and its networked structures of gender inequality. Appl Netw Sci 7, 20 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-022-00457-z