Short films and documentaries, two of cinema’s most liberated, dynamic, and immediate forms, are not merely starting points for storytelling, but artistic spaces in which the language of cinema is constantly renewed and aesthetic and technical boundaries are tested. While one transforms the constraint of duration into a formal advantage, distilling narrative to its most concentrated form, the other turns reality into a space of testimony, memory, and reflection. Independent of the possibilities afforded by large-scale productions, these two disciplines continue to serve as laboratories for some of the boldest and most innovative explorations in the seventh art since the birth of cinema.
Throughout its history of more than half a century, the International Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival has continued to provide a platform for short films and documentaries without compromising its principles of artistic freedom of expression, fair and transparent evaluation processes, and its commitment to cinema professionals. Guided by this understanding, the Festival will open its doors for the 63rd time from 24 to 31 October 2026, with the aim of encouraging independent filmmaking, supporting the bold visions of a new generation of filmmakers, and bringing the most recent examples of Turkish cinema to greater visibility.
Despite the changing and evolving dynamics surrounding the festival environment and independent film production in Türkiye, this year’s submission process once again demonstrates the strength of filmmakers’ desire to create and their artistic resilience. During the submission period, which began in June and concluded at the end of August, 267 films were submitted to the National Short Film Competition and 98 films to the National Documentary Film Competition. Despite the challenging conditions of the film industry, the productivity demonstrated by short film and documentary filmmakers, together with the high number of submissions, clearly underlines the importance of the role played by the Golden Orange within Türkiye’s festival ecosystem.
The competition selections shaped through the preliminary jury evaluations comprise 10 short films and 10 documentaries, all of which will have their Turkish premieres on the screens of Antalya, as in previous years. Serving not only as a first point of contact with audiences and the film industry on a national scale, but also as an important meeting point within the international cinema calendar, these films stand out both for their thematic diversity and for the formal, aesthetic, and genre-based explorations they undertake.
The films selected for the National Short Film Competition comprise works that stretch conventional narrative structures and demonstrate minimalist and distinctive approaches to visual language. Bringing together genre fluidity, a strong sense of atmosphere, approaches to directing actors, and original technical and aesthetic choices within distinctive mise-en-scène, these films converge across a broad thematic spectrum, ranging from hope and resistance to power relations, from experiences of womanhood to the contradictions of the adult world, and from coming-of-age stories to contemporary political issues. At times drawing on the possibilities of dark comedy and at others approaching reality more directly, these films reveal the diversity of contemporary short film production through their different narrative forms and cinematic explorations.
The National Documentary Film Competition, meanwhile, brings together a rich variety of approaches, ranging from observational filmmaking and biographical narratives to memory-oriented works constructed through archival material. While preserving the traditional vein of testimony that has long characterized contemporary documentary filmmaking in Türkiye, these films transform conventional forms through experiments in narrative and editing, bringing their cinematic choices into dialogue with a poetic aesthetic. Alongside stories that offer hope and inspiration through universal themes, these films trace the marks of labor, war, loss, and memory, focusing on the points of rupture in the relationship between individuals and the geographies they inhabit, and addressing social and political realities in all their layers.
In my third year as Coordinator of the National Short and Documentary Film Department, it was particularly meaningful for me to closely witness the process from the initial evaluation of submissions to the formation of the final selection, and once again to see the diversity of short film and documentary production in Türkiye. Behind every film submitted lies an act of labor undertaken under different circumstances, a risk taken, and a story that someone wishes to tell. For this reason, I see the films selected not merely as components of a competition, but as works that speak to the present and future of Turkish cinema.
Now it is time for these films to meet their audiences. Because a film’s true journey begins anew when the curtain rises and it encounters the gaze of the audience in a darkened cinema.
I hope that all the short films and documentaries meeting audiences as part of the 63rd International Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival will give rise to new encounters, conversations, and journeys. I would like to congratulate all the film teams who submitted their work, demonstrated the courage to create, and shared the value they bring to our cinema with us for their efforts, and invite all cinema lovers to experience these films together.
Arif Eren Karakaş
International Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival
National Short and Documentary Film Coordinator
