The İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) has removed the “Nerdesin Aşkım” (Where are You My Love) section, which had been in place since 2014 and consisted of queer films, from this year’s 44th İstanbul Film Festival, raising allegations of censorship. The institution, which has also removed the National Competition and National Documentary Competition, which have been organized at the festival since 1985, denied censorship in a statement to Diken, stating that “the changes in the sections do not affect the content of the film selection at the festival,” while İstanbul LGBTI+ Pride Week/İstanbul Pride published a statement calling for a boycott of the festival.
The removal of the section from the program was evaluated as “a new stage in the policies of invisibilization and censorship in the cultural field,” in the statement, which reads as follows: “By canceling the National Competition and the National Documentary Competition last year, the festival not only narrowed the production and screening spaces of local cinema, but also paved the way for the censorship mechanisms used against Kurdish Cinema to function. Now, it prefers to deepen the impact of censorship in the cultural sphere by destroying a section that makes queer existences visible. We know that this decision comes from the effort to criminalize queer visibility initiated by the state within the scope of the ‘Year of the Family,’ and we see that it also serves the policy of isolation for LGBTI+s in the current political pressure environment and we do not accept it.”
