Pegasus Airlines sponsors 14th London Turkish Film Festival

Pegasus Airlines, Turkey’s premier low fare airline, has announced their lead sponsorship of the 14th London Turkish Film Festival to be held between 5th and 18th December 2008. The festival will be making a Central London debut with its first ever red-carpet Gala opening at the BFI Southbank.

Opening the gala event on 5th December will be the UK premiere of Hüseyin Karabey’s award winning My Marlon & Brando, winning Best New Narrative Film-maker at the Tribeca Film Festival 2008 in New York and Best Asian–Middle Eastern Film Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival 2008. The gala opening promises to be a dazzling star-studded event, with luminaries from Turkish and British cinema sashaying down the red carpet.

“We are proud to be sponsoring such a landmark event as it moves into the centre of multicultural London this year – exciting times for us at Pegasus Airlines and for our increasingly confident Turkish film industry to be engaging a wider global audience”, says Ozlem Mutluer, PR & Marketing Manager for Pegasus Airlines.

The 14th London Turkish Film Festival will continue the tradition of highlighting both emerging and award-winning Turkish directors including Fatih Akin and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. In addition to the superb line-up of films in this year’s program showing at the BFI Southbank, Barbican, Odeon Covent Garden, Rio Cinema Dalston, Odeon Holloway Rd and Odeon Lee Valley, the Festival will also feature a selection 'Meet the Film-Maker' events and film-making workshops for children involving advice and hands-on experience on script-writing, film shooting and editing. The outputs will be screened in the short-film section of the Festival.

The 14th London Turkish Film Festival also ties in well with the launch of Pegasus Airlines’ new print, outdoor (London underground) and online advertising campaign in the UK which began in October 2008 to mark the increase in frequency on its London-Istanbul route to five flights weekly.

“It’s great brand synergy”, explains Ozlem Mutluer, “as the festival means we can engage with our target audience in a new and creative way, reflecting our position as Turkey’s second largest and fastest-growing airline with the youngest 737 fleet in Turkey.” Indeed, Pegasus Airlines is well and truly on the move with plans to launch daily flights from next year to Istanbul and direct flights to Bodrum.

For more information log on to Pegasusairlines.com/en.

To find out more about the film festival, log on to ltff.org.uk.