Ankara Mayor invites film producers to city

ANKARA - Anatolia News Agency

This photo shows Ankara’s famous Kuğulu Park. Mayor Melih Gökçek says that they will provide free studios to filmmakers in case of promoting the city in their film.

At a meeting held on March 4 at the Justice and Development Party Headquarters in Ankara, Mayor Melih Gökçek invited film and TV series producers to the city, saying that the municipality planned to establish a film studio.

Speaking about the municipality’s new plans for Ankara at the Local Administrations Consultancy Meeting, Gökçek said that they planned to establish a fair area in the city and continued:

 “We will also establish a film studio in the fair area. We have prepared the list of conditions for the film studio and we hope to get a tender out this week. We want it to be established by a foreign company. Then we will say to filmmakers: ‘come to Ankara and make a film here. We will give you these studios for free. But we have one condition: you must promote Ankara for at least five minutes in every hour you film. You must increase the tourism potential of the city.’”

Gökçek also said that Ankara would become the richest city in the world in terms of clock towers in the next two years: “We will erect 50-100 clock towers. Seğmenler – the symbol of Ankara - will come out and dance hourly just like in the clock towers abroad. There are ballerinas in these clock towers and they dance hourly. There are also many other original ideas. There will be clock towers everywhere and people will want to come to the city to see these towers,” he said.

Gökçek said that they also planned to organize a shopping festival in the city, starting from June 9 this year, simultaneously with the shopping festival in Istanbul. “Another project is a big zoo, and something similar to the 120-meter long Ferris wheel in London,” he added.