New York, NY (April 29, 2014) – The Moon and Stars Project, the arts & culture program of The American Turkish Society, is proud to present the 13th New York Turkish Film Festival. The festival will be held on May 16 - 25, 2014 at the School of Visual Arts Theatre. This year’s festival will build upon the success of “A Space Between: A Panorama of Cinema in Turkey,” a major retrospective of cinema from Turkey that featured twenty-nine films from 1958 to the present, which was co-presented by The Moon and Stars Project and The Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2012. This year, the film festival is made possible by its signature sponsor, Chobani, LLC, maker of America’s No. 1-selling Greek Yogurt brand, among other contributors.
By PERI SHARPE - ISTANBUL–This past year I fell in love with Istanbul, the city I have lived in for most of the last 18 years. I am a Turkish-American New Yorker, born in the U.S. to a Turkish mother and an American father. I moved to Istanbul from New York in 1996 for what I thought would be a year or so of getting to know the Turkish side of my family. And then I met someone. We fell in love, traveled back and forth between the two countries over the course of our 16-year marriage and until recently, I thought I was living in Istanbul because I was married to a Turkish man. I thought I was waiting for us to be able to move back to New York. Our plan for the future was to make our way back “home.”
Turkish musician Sera Tokay, who has been living in France, has become the first Turkish female orchestra conductor to give a concert at New York’s famous Carnegie Hall. In 2011, Tokay formed a chamber orchestra named Lutece Philharmonia in Paris and this year gave a concert in Carnegie Hall on Jan. 30. The concert, which featured the orchestra made up of young musicians who graduated from a Paris conservatory, the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris, was supported by the Washington-based Turkish Cultural Foundation and the New York-based America Turkish Women’s Union.
After a successful exhibition at the 20th Sculpture Objects and Functional Art - SOFA Chicago Fair earlier this month, Turkish contemporary art will now be on exhibit at the Hilton Asmus Contemporary Gallery in Chicago.
