The 5th International Istanbul Cartoon Festival

Wed, Sep 26, 2007

Art and animation, Comics and cartoons, Conventions and events

Neorama has details of the upcoming fifth International Istanbul Cartoon Festival, which runs from the 17th to 25th of November and is once more organised by the Yeni Yuksektepe Cultural Association. For those artists wishing to take part the theme for this year’s festival is ‘tolerance’ – from the official site (via Marko at Neorama): “As Yeni Yuksektepe Cultural Association, we related 5th International Istanbul Cartoon Festival with this theme in order to draw people’s attention to the problem of intolerance. Focusing on ‘tolerance’, which is one of our educational principles, we would like to combine the works of artists all around the world; give an opportunity to the artists in order to share their cartoons with people across the world and to provide unification among cultures.”

A laudable subject to highlight, I’m sure you’ll agree, especially given the ongoing problems with cartoons either being censored (such as the recent Opus strips which were pulled by many newspapers), furore over cartoon depictions of Mohamed and, of course, the host nation for the festival itself, Turkey, being no stranger to attacks on cartoons and artists. The deadline for entries is October 15th (Marko has the full details) and the art exhibited at the festival will also go on to be shown in cities throughout Turkey. The festival has a real international flavour to it – the previous event attracted 118 cartoonists from some 30 countries to take part, which is pretty inspiring, especially in the face of seemingly endless depressing tales of cartoon censorship.