Antalya’s annual Altın Portakal (Golden Orange) International Film Festival gets under way today amid a cloud of controversy over invitation of the big Serbian supporter and filmmaker, Bosnian-born, Emir Kusturica. Controversial author emigrated from Sarajevo shortly before the beginning of Serbian aggression and later appeared in Belgrade and publicly supported Serbian war efforts, as well as war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. Some local unconfirmed reports claim that he even changed his Muslim-sounding name Emir into a Serbian name. Publicly though, pro-Serbian film maker still goes under his trademark name Emir Kusturica, while still living in Serbia. His invitation made famous Turkish filmmaker Semih Kaplanoğlu boycott the Festival.

Altın Portakal is marking its 47th anniversary this year in a condensed program that will run for just five days, until next Thursday, hosting around 1,200 guests that include film professionals, critics and journalists from Turkey and abroad in Antalya.

Kusturica, the international award-winning Serbian filmmaker of “Underground” and “Time of the Gypsies” fame, will be a member of the panel of judges of the international feature film competition at this year’s Altın Portakal. The Antalya Foundation for Culture and Art (AKSAV), an Antalya Metropolitan Municipality-affiliated body that has organized the festival for the past two years, announced Kusturica’s taking part in the festival in late July.

However, the Serbian filmmaker’s presence in the festival has sparked ire during the week, with several Bosnian cultural associations based in Turkey voicing criticism of AKSAV for inviting Kusturica, who once made comments supportive of war criminals responsible for the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 during the Bosnian war, to Antalya.

Semih Kaplanoğlu, the director of the Berlin film festival Golden Bear-winning drama “Bal” (Honey), announced on Thursday that he has withdrawn his film from the festival, where it was going to be screened out of competition at a special gala on Monday.

AKSAV, dismissing criticisms and protests, said in statements released during the week that the festival is “only interested in Kusturica’s persona as an artist.”

In 2007, Kusturica was again among stars who visited Antalya for the annual festival, where he and his orchestra performed a concert during the opening gala of the event’s 44th edition. That year, Kaplanoğlu ran in the national feature competition with “Yumurta” (Egg), the first installment of his “Trilogy of Yusuf,” which went on to win the festival’s best film prize, and which is finalized with “Bal.”

Kaplanoğlu and the members of “Bal’s” cast and crew, in a statement issued on Thursday, said they will not be attending any of the events during this year’s festival, where the film was previously among entrants in the national feature film competition. The film was automatically left outside the competition lineup when it won the best film prize in last month’s Altın Koza (Golden Boll) International Film Festival in Adana in accordance with Altın Portakal regulations, which require that national competition films are chosen from among those that had not previously won an award in another festival.

The 47th Altın Portakal film festival is offering 191 films from 35 countries in total. Among them, 130 productions are from Turkey and include feature films (14 in national competition and others in several out-of-competition programs), 32 documentaries and 46 short films. Sixty-one films in the international section round up the bill, of which 11 titles are running in the international feature competition.

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