Foça Film Days was established in 2018 as a collaborative event organized by the Foça Municipality and a local tourism NGO. This international ‘boutique’ film festival offers visitors the opportunity to watch award-winning documentaries, meet their directors, and take part in free workshops while enjoying the historic atmosphere of a modern fishing village built atop an ancient Ionian city.
In 2019, the entire town of Foça embraced the festival, with restaurant and hoteliers providing meals and accommodations to visiting directors and archaeologists attending Foça Film Days as festival guests. Organization of the festival was undertaken by a volunteer group of Foça residents interested in promoting heritage conservation, encouraging its documentation and dissemination through film; strengthening inter-cultural understanding and appreciation for diversity; and organizing cultural activities in support of sustainable tourism.
In 2020, due to the global pandemic, Foça Film Days was conducted as a 100%-online festival to ensure sustainability, and in 2021, a hybrid format allowed us to welcome back a small live audience to Foça. Moreover, in order to grow the festival to ensure long-term economic as well as social benefits from cultural tourism and to promote Foça’s cultural heritage on international platforms, local volunteers coalesced into the Foça Film Platform in 2022.
Over the past few years, the Foça Film Platform has worked to broaden festival participation by reaching out to local high schools and universities, providing opportunities for students to meet filmmakers from throughout Turkey and abroad. We’ve also increased our partners, adding the Foça Maritime Museum to our festival venues. This has made it possible for us to feature a “Day of Workshops” that relate to the films included in our screening program and to present repeat showings of short films on the final day of the festival. The workshops are conducted by visiting filmmakers as well as volunteer artists working in different media.
Prompted by this expansion of activities, as well as a wish to provide a more solid institutional structure to Foça Film Days, in 2025 members of the Foça Film Platform helped to found a new civil society organization: the Foça Agora Laboratory Culture, Art, Environment and Tourism Association. Foça Agora Lab aims to support innovative, inclusive practices that bring together people from diverse backgrounds, encouraging civic participation in activities that focus on interactions among culture, art, the environment and tourism.
