'Egg' wins at Antalya festival

'Band's Visit' takes Eurasia prize

By NICK HOLDSWORTH

Turkey’s 44th national Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival and its younger concurrent partner the third Intl. Eurasia closed Sunday night with top awards, respectively, for Semih Kaplanoglu’s “Yumurta” (Egg) and Israeli director Eran Kolirin’s “The Band’s Visit.” The twinned festivals, which offer guests and visitors the best of Turkish films and a Eurasia-inclined international competition alongside a market and other industry networking opportunities, were overshadowed this year by violent clashes that erupted between the Turkish army and Kurdish nationalists on the country’s volatile border with Iraq.

A party organized for German-Turkish film “Edge of Heaven” was postponed by its PR company organizers. But the fighting did not prevent Francis Ford Coppola from attending a packed press conference. Other top winners at the national Golden Orange festival were Fatih Akin, who drew the director nod for “Edge of Heaven,” and Murat Han and Ozgu Namal, who won the actor and actress prizes, respectively, both for “Bliss.”

The director nod at the Eurasia festival went to Tunisian helmer Abdellatif Kechiche for “The Secret of the Grain.”