SECOND INTERMISSION AT THE HEART OF THE SILK ROAD

Recently, Bursa has become a city where so many cultural-artistic activities are being held. As the Mayor of this city, on behalf of the people of Bursa, I would like to indicate that we are proud of being one of the cultural centers of Turkey.

We simply aim to bring together the highest quality of music, cinema, theatre and our traditional arts with the people of Bursa. With our rich content festivals, we believe that we raise our city to the level of the world metropolises and we are trying to do our best to conserve the cultural and historical preciousness of our city.

Since we believe that not having a permanent international cinema event is an inadequacy for our city, we decided to come up with such an organization and make it traditional. We truly believe that our city, which is the historical centre of sericulture, silk production and the ancient stop of the Silk Road, highly deserves such a film festival.

With these thoughts and feelings, last year we invited forty five films from seventeen different countries; we hosted forty international guests and over one hundred national guests from the cinema industry.

Our first year’s excitement was met with great sympathy of the audience, directors, actors/actresses, screenwriters and all of the cinema employees who had given their lives to the art of cinema and those days have become a feast of cinema for Bursa. Being covered by national and international media and being mentioned among the international cinema festivals increased our excitement and encouraged us for the forthcoming editions.

This year we are organizing competitions in short film, documentary and feature film categories. As we believe in encouraging and supporting future directors, we decided to give the highest award that has ever been given in any short film category in this country.

2nd International Bursa Silk Road Film Festival starts with such an excitement. A richer program; longer festival evenings wait for us.

Hikmet Sahin
Mayor of Bursa and
Honorary President of
2nd International Bursa Silk Road Film Festival