Our Story

Where this happens: Ankara

Ankara is the capital of Türkiye and its second-largest city — but it is not the city most people picture when they think of Turkish cinema. That would be Istanbul, some four hundred kilometres to the west, where the industry, the money and the distributors are.

Ankara sits inland, high on the Anatolian steppe: a dry, continental city of civil servants, universities and long winters. It was a modest Anatolian town until the young Republic made it the capital in the 1920s and built a city around that decision. The railway was central to that transformation, and Ankara's maintenance and repair sheds were built to serve a capital expanding at speed. It has been a place of institutions and infrastructure ever since — and, as a consequence, a place where culture has to be organised rather than simply arrived at. Advantour

That shapes everything about how film works here. There is no industry to be absorbed into and no commercial circuit waiting for you. What Ankara has instead is a deep, stubborn, largely voluntary scene: university film societies, short-film associations, cine-clubs, an international film festival that has been running since 1988, and generations of filmmakers who learned to make work without asking permission. Almost everything here exists because somebody decided it should. Wikipedia

The Sustainers Film Festival takes place at CerModern, which is the argument of this entire festival in architectural form. It occupies railway traction workshops and maintenance sheds dating from the 1920s. When the railroad was rerouted the buildings fell out of use, and all of them were initially slated for demolition; instead, a decision was taken to turn them into an art museum. The centre opened to the public in April 2010, across roughly twelve thousand square metres of former industrial structure. It now describes itself as Turkey's first green and sustainable museum. Architizer + 2

A building that was going to be thrown away, hosting a festival about films that were going to be thrown away. We did not choose the venue by accident.

Two festivals, one idea

Before there was a Sustainers Film Festival, there were two others in Ankara — both built on the same stubborn conviction: that a film's life does not end where the industry decides it ends.

We ran them for years out of the Ankara Short Filmmakers Association. One was about re-evaluation. The other was about re-imagination. Everything we do now comes out of what those two taught us.

Why "2. El"

The name needs a word of explanation in English.

"İkinci el" — abbreviated "2. el" — is Turkish for second-hand. Literally it means "second hand": the hand a thing passes into once the first owner is finished with it. It is an everyday commercial phrase, the language of used-car lots, second-hand bookshops and flea markets, and it carries the same faint condescension it carries in English. Second-hand means previously owned. Nobody says it as a compliment.

We named a film festival after it on purpose.

Because the phrase contains, quietly, the entire argument. A second-hand object is not a broken object. Nothing is wrong with it. It has simply already had one life, and the market has decided that this makes it worth less — not because of anything the object did, but because of where it now sits in the chain of ownership.

That is precisely what happens to a film that has been through a preliminary selection. It comes out the other side unchanged, and worth less.

So the festival took the insult and used it as a category. Films that had already passed through someone else's hands. Second-hand films, screened without apology, under a name that says exactly what they are.

2. El — The Second-Hand Film Festival

Every film festival in the world runs a preliminary selection. A committee watches the submissions, draws a line, and most films fall below it. What happens to those films afterwards is nobody's job. They go back into a hard drive. Very often that is the end of the story.

1. El was built to be the other end of that story. Organised by the Ankara Short Filmmakers Association with the support of the Directorate General of Cinema, it was billed as the world's first and only festival of films eliminated in preliminary selection. The entry condition was, quite literally, rejection: to be eligible, a film had to have been eliminated in the preliminary round of some previous festival. Submissions were open to work made from 2007 onwards, with shorts capped at twenty minutes; for features, elimination was the only restriction that applied. Filmloverss

That single rule changed everything about how the festival felt. Filmmakers arrived carrying something they had been treating as a private failure and discovered it was the ticket in. Audiences watched knowing that every film on the programme had already been told no by someone. Some of those films were rough. Some were extraordinary, and had simply landed on the wrong desk on the wrong day.

The festival ran for ten editions. By the ninth, the programme carried 84 short films, two features and seven documentaries across three days of screenings, galas, workshops and talks. It was hosted inside a shopping centre rather than an art-house cinema — a deliberate choice to put these films in front of people who had not planned on seeing a film that day. One edition opened with a restored print of Halit Refiğ's Gurbet Kuşları, made in 1964, marking a hundred years of Turkish cinema. Sadibey + 2

The programme carried the joke all the way through. Alongside the second-hand films, the festival ran sections called "1. el filmler" — first-hand films — as well as "Dönüşenler" (Those That Transform) and "Dönüşümü Muhteşem Olanlar" (Those Whose Transformation Was Magnificent). Filmloverss

And there was no ticket. To get in, you brought a second-hand book. Visitors dropped their books into "transformation boxes" set up in the screening area and attended the festival free of charge; afterwards the books were collected and sorted. Filmloverss

That admission model was invented more than a decade ago, for a film festival about rejected films — and it is the direct ancestor of the way audiences enter the Sustainers Film Festival today, carrying organic waste instead of books. Second-hand films then; organic waste now. The claim has not changed: the thing in your hand is not finished with.

What 2. El was not

It matters to say this plainly, because the concept invites a few wrong assumptions.

It was not a festival of bad films. Preliminary selection is a filter with a fixed capacity, not a verdict on quality. A committee that can take forty films out of nine hundred is measuring shelf space as much as merit. 2. El never claimed the rejected films were secretly masterpieces; it claimed the rejection carried far less information than everyone was treating it as carrying.

It was not a consolation prize. There was a real competition, a real jury and real awards. Juries were drawn from across cinema and public life — programmers, designers, editors, cinematographers and cultural figures. Filmmakers competed to win, not to be comforted. Hürriyet

It was not a protest against other festivals. We were, and are, part of the same ecosystem. The argument was never that selection is illegitimate. It was that selection is singular — and that a system with only one filter discards more than it can afford to.

It was not nostalgia, and it was not an archive project. The eligibility window was recent work, not heritage cinema. These were contemporary films in the first years of their life, already falling out of circulation.

Fantasturka — Turkish-Made Fantastic Films

If 2. El dealt with films that had been rejected, Fantasturka dealt with an entire genre tradition that had been quietly written out of the national film history.

Launched in Ankara in September 2011, Fantasturka drew on the science fiction, horror, thriller, crime, western and heroic-fantasy corners of Turkish film history — around thirty features and shorts in its first edition, alongside talks with the surviving masters of the form, who were honoured with lifetime achievement awards. The pool it drew from was enormous: close to three thousand fantastic films made in Turkey from the 1950s onwards, most of which never reached an audience, screened with the participation of people who had been in the room when they were made. SadibeyT24

For an international audience, some of these titles need no introduction even if the names do. The programmes included Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam — the film the world knows as "Turkish Star Wars" — along with Drakula İstanbul'da, one of the earliest Dracula adaptations made anywhere, and Zagor. A single feature programme ran fourteen Turkish fantastic films made between 1953 and 1994, from 3 Dev Adam to Tarzan İstanbul'da and Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda. Yeni ŞafakNarsanat

These were films made with almost nothing, at speed, under conditions no producer today would accept — and they are inventive in ways that expensive cinema rarely manages. For decades they were treated as an embarrassment. Fantasturka put them back on a screen, in front of an audience paying attention, next to the people who made them.

Guests included Çetin İnanç, director of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, Levent Çakır of Zagor, and Hasan Karacadağ, one of the leading figures in contemporary Turkish horror. Screenings were free, and openings filled: hundreds attended the Istanbul opening, where Can Evrenol took audience questions after a screening of his horror film Baskın. By 2015 the festival had widened its scope to include Turkish horror cinema from the 2000s onwards, opening its own call for entries in fantasy and horror, and ran in two cities in the same year. T24 + 2

What the two of them taught us

Across both festivals we ran screenings, talks, workshops and special selections, and the same pattern emerged every time: the value in the room was never only the film. It was the conversation the film made possible. The person in the third row who found out that somebody else had made the thing they had been afraid to try. The director who had written a film off, watching an audience prove otherwise.

One festival taught us how to re-evaluate — how to look again at work the system had already judged. The other taught us how to re-imagine — how to look at what already exists and see raw material rather than a closed case.

Put those two habits together and you arrive, almost inevitably, at ecology. Not as a theme, and not as a subject for the films to be about, but as a description of how we were already working. A film that has fallen out of circulation and organic matter that has gone to landfill share the same structure: nothing is wrong with the thing itself. It has only been sent to the wrong place.

Today

The Sustainers Culture and Ecology Association brings that accumulated experience back together — for culture, for ecology, and for a shared life.

We collect organic waste, produce compost and worm castings, and grow saplings from what comes out of it. And we run a film festival where the admission fee is that waste, where the programme is built around what can be returned to circulation, and where the festival itself is held to the same standard it asks of everyone else.

The story continues.