Rhode Island International Film Festival 2009

Thirty-something ALPER is a talented chef who runs his own restaurant. He may have achieved success in business, but the same cannot be said of his personal life. While caught in the triangle of his gastronomic creations, one-night stands and escort girls, he suddenly finds his life take a new turn when he walks into a second-hand bookshop in the backstreets of Beyoglu to buy and old record he has been looking for.ADA is an attractive, unassuming and relatively stable woman in her late 20s who designs and makes fancy dress costumes for kids. One day, while wandering around Beyoglu in search of a second-hand book, she walks into the same shop as Alper. A womaniser by nature, Alper is impressed by Ada's good looks and sets off in pursuit. As a pretext for introducing himself, he tracks down the book Ada was looking for, buys it and then presents it to her.As it turns out, this book is the beginning of a passionate affair between the two. But the harder Alper tries to create space for Ada in his existing life, the more restricted, the more claustrophobic he starts to feel. Ada, however, is blissfully unaware of the poison in Alper's blood and delights on being in love.Ada and Alper live out their romance as far as they are able and in the measure to which life allows them. In Mustafa Hakkinda Hersey (All About Mustafa) Cagan Irmak deals with the lies thrown at us by life; in Babam ve Oglum (My Father and My Son) his standpoint is that of a tight-knit Aegean family; and in Ulak (The Messenger) he tells us of the world we live in by believing in stories. This time, however, he sets his story in the metropolis.ALONE is a film that tells of people isolated and made lonely by modern life; people who need people but are blind to that need in the maelstrom of the metropolis; blind, that is, until it is too late. It is a story about food, mothers, old songs and love; a story both bitter and full of hope. PRODUCTION NOTESShooting for a period of five weeks, ALONE used natural locations that were dressed up and redecorated to match the needs of the script.For this film, too, Cagan Irmak reassembled the principal crew he has worked with on many previous successful productions, with the addition this time of DoP Gokhan Tiryaki, who was named Best Cinematographer at the World Film Festival of Bangkok in 2006.The original score, which was recorded live by a large string orchestra, was composed by ARIA. A number of treasured songs from the 70s were also used in the film soundtrack.Careful to brief his cast and crew thoroughly in advance in order to obtain a natural, spontaneous look for the film, the director scheduled in extra hours with his actors to ensure they slipped easily out of role again. Locations were centred largely on the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, where shooting sometimes required a hidden camera and sometimes large crowds of extras. A number of scenes were also photographed in Tarsus, on the southeast Mediterranean coast. Shot in scope, the film was based for the laboratory stage at Istanbul's Sinefekt Studios. The production used synch sound throughout photography, bringing in an experienced crew from overseas for the purpose.CASTCEMAL HUNALMELIS BIRKANYILDIZ KULTURSERIF BOZKURTGOZDE KANSUANDGONCAGUL SUNARMUSICARIADIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHYGOKHAN TIRYAKIEXECUTIVE PRODUCERESI GULCEPRODUCTION COMPANYMOST PRODUCTIONPRODUCERMUSTAFA OGUZWRITTEN & DIRECTED BYCAGAN IRMAK

In a tiny town, 33 miles north of Belgrade in war torn Serbia, a group of villagers decide that they alone must change their destiny. After 4,000 years of floods, famine and war, the people of Zitiste unite in the selection of new symbol they hope will reverse their fortune. Unanimously, they select Rocky Balboa as the one icon that will lead them to prosperity. This is the true story of the journey and quest to build a Rocky Balboa statue in the middle of a tiny town and the villagers who would successfully force the eyes of the world on its meager existence and change things forever. After the story first appeared in The New York Times, the village attracted thousands of media outlets and curious tourists. For the villagers, their dream had become a reality. This film was made with the full co-operation of Sylvester Stallone.

Commissioned by the International Center of Photography Museum this film was created to honor Annie Leibovitz and her Lifetime Achievement Infinity Award. the film looks back at 40 years of Leibovitz' work beginning with her reportage work for Rolling Stone through her current work for Vanity Fair and Vogue.the interview and portrait filming was shot on-location at Annie Leibovitz Studio NYC.

“Another Harvest Moon” is the powerful emotional story of four elderly residents in nursing home who become like a family to each other, with all the bickering, loving and caring that such relationships entail. But three generations of their families are conflicted, too, as their lives and love for each other are torn by the difficult decisions they must face.

George is a resident of a nursing home who is about to lose his room. Paula, the woman who watches over him, takes George for a walk. As we follow them through a day filled with ups and downs Paula struggles with George's jumbled memories and gets in over her head as she tries to solve the crisis partly for George, but mostly for herself.

ART & COPY is about advertising and creativity, and its profound effects on modern culture. Like Dorothy pulling the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz himself, the film intimately reveals the relatively unknown personalities and stories of the most influential advertising creatives of our time. Beginning with advertising's "Creative Revolution" of the mid-1960s (Bill Bernbach), LAUNCH features writers and artists such as Lee Clow, who introduced Macintosh computer in "1984"; Dan Wieden, who coined "Just Do It" and changed how our nation views sports; Hal Riney, whose emotional ads for Reagan insured his reelection; Phyllis K. Robinson who helped invent the "me generation" with a Clairol tagline; George Lois, who vitalized MTV and introduced Tommy Hilfiger overnight; Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein who "Got Milk?", and Mary Wells Lawrence, who repackaged the City of New York via her "I love NY" campaign. By defying the conventions of traditional advertising, each of these individuals brought a revolutionary spirit to their work. Directed by documentarian Doug Pray ("Surfwise," "Big Rig," "Scratch") the film interweaves stunning cinematography of TV satellites being launched, billboards being erected, and some of the greatest ad campaigns of all time, resulting in an inspiring synthesis of art, commerce and human emotion. If advertising is the "cave painting of our era," ART & COPY is ultimately about our innate, human need to communicate and the nature of creativity itself. It explores and defines great advertising as a rare and rebellious act from an industry more typically associated with mediocrity and manipulation.

Many of us assume that there are only two genders and that being female or male follows from the sex of our biological bodies. Focusing on the art, photography and performances of five "alternative" gender artists Assume Nothing poses the questions: "What if "male" and "female" are not the only options? How do other genders express themselves through art?" Fresh from the Frameline 33 Festival in San Francisco, Assume Nothing takes its title from the work of renowned New Zealand photographer Rebecca Swan’s book “Assume Nothing” (2004), which reveals an extraordinary diversity of gender identity from the Pacific region and beyond. Assume Nothing creates “living” portraits of four artists featured in Swan’s work, woven together by a portrait of Swan herself as an artist. The featured Maori, Samoan-Japanese, and Pakeha- European artists weave tales of growing up in gender identities that fall outside conventional Western definitions of masculinity and femininity. And through their paintings, performances, photographs and weavings they also tell stories of this “alternative” gender as it expresses itself now through their art. The participants include Jack Byrne - transgender-activist and spoken word artist, and Shigeyuki Kihara, a Samoan/Japanese-born Fa’a fafine [1] working in visual and performance art disciplines. Assume Nothing travels with Shigeyuki as she mounts her solo exhibition at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Assume Nothing explores Maori cultural gender understandings with weaver and performer Ema Lyon who identifies as “ia”, a single Maori word meaning “he-she”. The film also explores the significance of creating a positive visual iconography with intersex activist Mani Bruce Mitchell, incorporating her extensive archive of family slides with Super-8 animations to create new resonances in the family myth-making process. In collaborating with these artists to tell their stories, Assume Nothing blurs the conventions of documentary, animation and drama in a compelling and universal celebration of courage and creativity. [1] [1] A fa’a fafine is a Samoan who is born biologically male, gifted with the spirit of a woman (and a man).