Turkish student to debut at Cannes Film Festival

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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"Bir Kaplumbağa ile Tavşanın Hikayesi" ("The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare") was made by Abdulbaki Yavuz, a student in the Fine Arts Faculty Cinema-TV Department at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, or ÇOMÜ. The movie will be shown in the "Short Film Corner" section of the prestigious festival and put up for sale to producers and collectors of short films.

"I tried to relate the competition between the tortoise and the hare, which is a well-known children’s story, in a modern way, through the eyes of the tortoise," said Yavuz, who added that his film, which compares modern life to the natural world in a metaphoric style, was accepted by many other national and international festivals besides Cannes.

"The most important feature of the film, which was shot last year in Istanbul and the Marmara district of Çanakkale with much financial difficulty, is that the impossibility of it stays behind the camera," said Yavuz, who made the movie for 4,000 Turkish Liras and is looking for support for his next projects. "When you see the movie, you think it is a big-budget one. The reason is the devotion of the people who worked on the film."

The famous Cannes party scene may be a leaner affair in this year of economic crisis, but all-out warfare looms on the movie front as the world's hottest directors, including Ang Lee to Quentin Tarantino, battle to take home the festival trophy.

"All the great names of world cinema are here," said festival director Thierry Fremaux as a galaxy of stars geared up for the movie industry's biggest annual binge on the palm-fringed Cannes beachfront.

The 2009 event, which continues through May 24, will see the festival’s "biggest heavyweight auteur smack-down in recent years," wrote Variety magazine. As the countdown began to the 12-day frenzy of screenings, parties and wheeling and dealing, festival organizers said that despite the crisis, the scheduled attendance seemed on par with previous years - 4,000 members of the press and 10,000 people in the movie industry. But behind the scenes, everyday services, see belt-tightening in the air as industry players cut back on champagne and other extras.

This year, the festival kicks off for the first time with a 3-D animation, Disney-Pixar's "Up."