Robin Saban is the Founder/President of the International Student Film Festival Hollywood.
Mr. Saban began his career in the entertainment industry as a writer and director in Montreal, Canada. He wrote and directed several plays for live theatre while living in Montreal from 1992 to 1996. In Los Angeles since 1998, Mr. Saban worked in the entertainment industry as a film editor and project developer, and co-wrote the film script titled “29 Palms”.

Mr. Saban studied film and theater at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada (1991). In 1997, he studied digital film and video editing software “AVID” at Video Symphony in Burbank, California.

The International Student Film Festival Hollywood which Mr. Saban founded, offers student filmmakers from all over the world a unique opportunity to gain the recognition of film industry leaders, creating career development opportunities in their home countries as well as in the United States.

Website: www.isffhollywood.org

Born north of Izmir (Turkey) on 25.09.1960, Osman Engin came as a twelve-year-old boy to Germany in 1973. He studied social studies at Bremen and graduated in 1989.

Between 1983 and 2003, Osman Engin wrote satirical short stories every month for the city magazine “Der Bremer” (”The Bremener)”, after which he switched to the Hamburg magazine “Oxmox”. He has already published twelve books. “Kanaken-Gandhi” is so far the most successful and will soon be made into a film. His newest book, “A Turkish Christmas”, came out last year.

Osman hopes through his satires to make the reader aware of injustices in society. He wants to provoke reflection. At the same time, he wants to tackle the issue of German-Turkish relations. “The Germans would call it holding up a mirror,” he says.

Last year, Engin recieved the ARD Media prize for his satire I am the Pope. This is an important acknowledgment of his work. His satire, according to the jury, “makes fun of everyday prejudices and clichés.” He wonders, admittedly, what Germany’s Turkish population thinks of his literary work. “The best recognition of my satires is the laughter of my audience,” grins Osman.

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He was born in Izmir in 1947. He graduated from University of Ankara, Faculty of Language and Geography. He has three diplomas from department of Theatre; department of Classis Roman Language and Department of History of Greek Literature.

Later, he attended a PH. D. Program on Children Theatre. He worked for long years at Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) where he started as a producer and script writer then became Ankara Television Director. In 1978, he prepared and brought to life international 23rd April Children Festival. And for 12 years he was the president of the organization committee for the festival. He also represented TRT at European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

During his career, he wrote may children plays as well as scripts for television and cinema.

AN ODD MAN by Necef Ugurlu

Refik Erduran is one of our controversial writers. That is to say, he goes against the grain and triggers strife.

Our man in the street knows him above all as Nazim Hikmet’s rescuer and as the first Turk to try Viagra (on a journalistic mission). You’d think he had done little else.

He was in the Korean War. He had adventures in Beyrouth, Vienna, Budapest. Then he went to war again in Bosnia.

His strangest trait is boredom with success. He founded a firm that ushered in a new era in book and magazine publishing. It was also extraordinarily lucrative. He got bored and quit. He was one of our most influential newspaper columnists. Got bored and quit. He started a production company that was filling the largest theatre halls. Got bored and quit.

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ANASTASIA M. ASHMAN is a career essayist specializing in personal tales
of cultural adventure. She is the co-editor of Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey (Dogan Kitap 9/05, in Turkish and
English; Seal Press in North America, 3/06), a transcendent expatriate
Literature collection called “absolutely riveting” by legendary world explorer Tim Severin, “insightful” by Tony Wheeler of Lonely Planet, while CNN correspondent Andrew Finkel finds it “addictive”, and the award-winning Turkish novelist Elif Safak declares that it “successfully transcends cultural stereotypes.” Tales from the Expat Harem is her first book, adding a new facet to ten years’ experience evaluating and editing creative material in New York and Los Angeles media and entertainment, working for literary agents and producers of film, television, and Broadway theatre. She is at work on Berkeley to Byzantium: The Reorientation of a California Adventuress, a cultural memoir charting the peaks and valleys of her adventurous life, from mean elevators and subways of Manhattan to the gilded palaces of Asia Minor — and Southeast Asia, where she lived for five years.

For Cornucopia, a glossy magazine for connoisseurs of Turkey worldwide,
Anastasia has written about joining a Turkish family; she has encapsulated the vanishing cuisine of a Chinese-Malayan subculture, as well as covered Malaysia’s architectural heritage movement for Asia’s oldest newsweekly magazine, Dow Jones’ Far Eastern Economic Review; and for art and literary sections of newspapers like The Asian Wall Street Journal and The Village Voice in New York City, she has reviewed historical nonfiction scribes, avant garde multimedia poets, and multicultural travel commentators like Pico Iyer. Her essays appear in the women’s humor collection The Thong Also Rises (Travelers’ Tales, September 2005) and alongside noted authors like Calvin Trillin and Jonathan Lethem in The Subway Chronicles, an anthology about the New York subway system (Chamberlain Bros., Summer 2006). Born and
raised in the progressive California town of Berkeley, she studied classical clarinet and Kodokan judo for more than a decade each. She holds a degree inClassical Greek, Roman and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and lives in Istanbul with her husband Burc Sahinoglu.

TALES FROM THE EXPAT HAREM:
Foreign Women in Modern Turkey
A nonfiction anthology edited by
Anastasia M. Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gokmen Publication
Turkey (English and Turkish): Dogan Kitap 9/05 USA and Canada: Seal
Press 03/06

Order now from Amazon

www.expatharem.com

Tuncer CÜCENOĞLU was born in l944 in Çorum/Turkey.

He is educated in theatre and playwrighting at Ankara University. He is a
member of the State Theatres script selecting board, Turkish Writers Union and International Pen Club Turkish center. He is MSM Private Conservatory dramatic playwrighting professor. “Papirüs Publishing House” theatre section director.

Scripts:
Chaos, The Teacher, Poor Women, Dead End, The File, Biga – 1920, The Gamblers, Helicopter, Kemal The Thunder, Matrushka, The Visitor, The Hat, The Painter, Neyzen, Red River, The Avalanche, Theatremen, Sabahattin Ali, Green Night, If I Were a Poor Man, Che Guevara.

Awards:
Tobav(2),Turkish Women Association (l), Ankara Art Society (2), Abdi Ipekçi (l), Ismet Kuntay (l) , Avni Dilligil (2), ITI (l), Kasaid (l), Lions (2), Cultural Ministry (l) and 2 international (Yugoslavia and Holland).

His plays are translated into Russian, English, German, Farsian, French, Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Swedish, Georgian, Urdu, Japanese, Romanian, Azerian, Tatarian, Polish, Chuvash, Serbian, Spanish, Arabic.

Some of the plays (The Avalanche, The Hat, The Painter, Poor Women, Red River, The File, Helicopter, The Visitor, Dead End and Matruskha) are performed or in the repertory of the companies of more than 30 countries.

e-mail: tcucenoglu@yahoo.com