Last year saw major political upheavals in Turkey, with a summer of street unrest and a corruption scandal that led to the resignations of members of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's cabinet.
This state of affairs was reflected at the 33rd International Film Festival in Istanbul, which ran from April 5 to 20, with festival director Azize Tan declaring that: "My manifesto for the festival would simply be the word 'freedom' - meaning that we should be able to express ourselves."
In 1988, government inspectors forced the withdrawal of five films. This year, the festival's director for the past eight years reported early on that "one of our films in the national competition, Let's Sin by Onur Ünlu, was rated +18 but, really, there is nothing in the movie that can justify this decision. It's a funny detective story, Ünlu is a popular director, and people love his films," Tan says. "Now the censorship commission has said they might rectify their decision. I personally believe nothing good can come out of censorship or of being afraid of each other. In this specific context, the festival is very important because we are trying to create a kind of solidarity."
At the same time, Tan also pointed to the nation's oldest and biggest film event having been granted certain screening privileges. "There is still some space for freedom, and we try to make the most out of it: for instance, Nymphomaniac by Lars von Trier was banned for domestic distribution, but we were able to show it at the festival."
Traditionally committed to promoting an open-minded and engaged approach to cinema, the 2014 edition introduced a new section for films dealing with love, regardless of age or gender. It was named "Where Are You My Love?", after the slogan created during last year's protests by the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) movement.
It also continued to play host to a Human Rights in Cinema competition which, this year, had The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh's stylised memoir about the horrors of a childhood under Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, as its winner.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Turkish film industry, the festival put together an extensive special programme featuring its most representative works. Included in the focus was a retrospective of the restored oeuvre of Yanaki and Milton Manaki, photography and cinema pioneers who made motion pictures in the Balkans and the Ottoman empire.