The Wınged Seahorse Awards

The Internatıonal Uşak Short Fılm Festıval

Uşak Winged Seahorse Film Festival or with its new name International Uşak Short Film Festival is the first and only film festival of Uşak, which started in 2014 and hosted the world famous Karun Treasures and its unique richness, the Winged Seahorse Brooch. It is a cinema event organized by the Communication Community of Uşak University.

Festival’s general coordinator is undertaken by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Murat Sezgin and Dr. Onur Keşaplı and it was embodied by the efforts of the community students. In its first year, the festival met with the audience with a selection of award-winning short films and hosted the first screening of Meine Beschneidung, directed by Arne Ahrens, in Turkey. After the first festival enriched with workshops and interviews, Uşak Winged Seahorse Short Film Festival took a competing form and aimed to contribute to the strengthening and dissemination of short film in Turkey and to make our cinema more qualified in the national context. The festival, which added master classes, forums and retrospectives among its non-screening events, continued to grow in the following years and simultaneously met with cinemagoers in multiple theaters.

It has managed to become a qualified and distinguished event with academicians, intellectuals and artists from different fields of the movies, who took part in both the pre-selection and main selection committees, with its arrangements that will facilitate and contribute to short films and short filmmakers. Uşak Winged Seahorse Short Film Festival, in its fourth year as hosting National and National Student Competitions, in line with the decision taken in 2016, has brought in something new a national by paying copyrights to all films that passed the pre-selection. The festival, which included subheadings such as image, art, fiction, acting and screenplay in a total of 11 awards given in two competitions, led other festivals at this point and in payment of copyrights.

The Uşak Winged Seahorse Short Film Festival, which was moved to the international scale for the first time in its fifth year, received 3300 film applications from 116 countries during the five-month call period and became the largest participating event in the history of the city and university on the basis of foreign countries. As of 2018, Uşak Winged Seahorse Short Film Festival had the distinct honor of the most works compete in the history of Turkish short film festivals. After the festival, which was successfully completed with the participation of its international guests, as well as increasing the number of applications, the Uşak Winged Seahorse Short Film Festival, which became the choice of artists who took part in the Academy Awards where oscars were distributed with distinguished festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Toronto, Sundance, has became an address where the best in the world competed. With another first such as the Intermediate Select Committee, the festival, which combines Cannes and Oscar models in its competition sections and hosts the Asia and Turkey premieres of many foreign films, is shown as the best and ideal short film festival in the country as a result of the evaluation of many institutions in Turkey. In 2018 and 2019, the Festival was awarded the "Golden Festival" award by the Association of Short Film Directors as the only festival that meets all of the festival criteria of the association, and in the same years it was awarded with the title of "Class A Festival" according to behind the scenes ratings from Turkey`s leading cinema platforms.

The International Uşak Short Film Festival and The Winged Seahorse Awards are expected to contribute to the strengthening of the short film field and the development of cinema culture in Turkey. In addition, it continues to enrich the cultural life of the university and the city and every year in December it moves the center of the seventh art in Turkey to Uşak.