娱乐英语新闻:Interview: Debuting Turkish filmmaker presents story of friendship in Venice Film Festival

VENICE, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- Debuting Turkish director Kaan Mujdeci presented his movie Sivas in competition at the ongoing 71th Venice Film Festival.

In an exclusive interview with Xinhua Friday, the director illustrated his film with vivid descriptions.

The impressive and inspiring landscapes of a contemporary Anatolia are the set of story of friendship between a boy and a big fighting dog taking place in a remote and traditional village.

The story is about friendship even if Aslan the young 11 years old protagonist, and owner of dog Sivas, will have to fight at school and love.

Children and dogs are the protagonists of the movie. He describes how he was working with them, he said: "For me it was not difficult to work with them on set, I consider children like the adults and I pay the same respect to everybody. You have to be more respectful with children-actors because they can't work for 12 hours and sometimes they can get tired or bored or they just want to sleep for a while."

"As I respected children, I did the same with the dogs and in the fight scenes we used artificial blood," he continued.

The landscape plays an important part as an impressive visual effect, but for the Turkish movie director "this is a universal story that could have taken place everywhere. Then we show in the movie the macho culture that you can find everywhere and not only in Turkey but also in other countries."

Kaan Mujdeci presented his short movies in various Europeanfilm festivals, in 2010 he showed his short "Day of German Unity" at the Cannes Film Festival Short Film Corner.

Asked about his sources of inspiration, Mujdeci clarifies his way of working on set, he said "when I write I don't make a real plan because the story is coming out by itself. If I want to tell something, I start to write without planning, when I see some objects or people around me the inspirations come. I don't want to make a story in a literary way, and then when the script is finished I start planning everything like the casting, etc," he said.

Financing is still a big challenge for young filmmakers but festival like Venice can help, the Turkish filmmaker explained that working is very difficult because of the lack of financial resources.

Talking about future projects, Mujdeci underlines that he has a new project and Venice was very useful for finding financial resources, then "when I write a movie I have no genre and I don't start thinking to make a drama or a comedy. I don't work for the producer but for myself so I work only If I can keep my artistic ideas," he said.