Szabo to be jury at Turkish festival

ISTANBUL - Anatolia News Agency

Director Istvan Szabo will be the International Competition jury president at the 49th Golden Orange Film Festival. AFP Photo

World-famous Hungarian director Istvan Szabo will be the International Competition jury president at the 49th Golden Orange Film Festival.

This year’s Golden Orange Film Festival, which will start Oct. 12, aims to criticize the system while making people laugh, under the theme “Humor, Opposition and Democracy.” This central theme will be reflected in panels, seminars, conferences and workshops. Szabo will also attend a film workshop during the festival. The festival’s street performances will also be designed to reflect the voice of the “other.”

The festival will focus on Turkish and world cinema from the 1990s. Audiences will see masterpieces that made their mark on the cinematic scene in the 1990s within the theme of social criticism with humorous approach.

The beginning of Szabo’s career coincided with the beginning of a “new wave” in Hungarian cinema, one of several new wave cinema scenes that appeared around this time throughout Western and Eastern Europe. The Eastern European new waves were caused by political liberalization, the decentralization of film industries and the emergence of films as valuable commodities for export to Western European markets. The resulting films were more formally experimental, politically anti-establishment, and, especially in the case of Szabo, psychologically probing than the films of the previous generation.