Istanbul Film Festival cancelled in protest over ban on gay drama Queer

The Istanbul Film Festival has been cancelled in protest over a local government ban on the gay drama Queer, starring Daniel Craig.

Arthouse film streaming platform Mubi said it was canceling the four-day festival just hours before it opened, The Guardian reports.

"Hours before it was due to start... we were informed by the Kadikoy district authorities that Queer had been banned on the grounds that it contained provocative content that could disturb the peace," the statement read.

The authorities said the ban was "for security reasons."

The aforesaid film, directed by Luca Guadagnino and premiered at the Venice Film Festival last month, stars Craig as a lonely, drug-addicted gay man. The love story between two men, based on a short novel by William S. Burroughs, includes explicit sex scenes that track their emotional ups and downs.

Mubi condemned the ban as “restricting art and freedom of expression.”

Although homosexuality was decriminalized in Turkey in 1858, it is widely condemned, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regularly calling LGBTQ+ people “perverts” and accusing them of posing a threat to traditional families.