5th EthnoKino "Magic" Cappadocia

5’th EthnoKino Film Festival “Magic” Arrives in Cappadocia: Reimagining Heritage Through Cinema 

Red Kilim Carpet Runway 2-5 August Cappadocia.

CAPPADOCIA, TURKEY – Welcome to a place where the land breathes myths, pigeons still carry prayers, and stories are etched into stone. This year, the EthnoKino Film Festival spreads its wings to Cappadocia, Turkey’s enchanted heart, a living sculpture of time and transformation. Carved by wind and wisdom, this UNESCO World Heritage Site becomes the newest host to a festival born from ethnographic cinema, ancestral reverence, and planetary care.

Our 2025 edition, themed “Magic,” is more than a celebration it is a cinematic pilgrimage. Held in the dreamlike valleys of Göreme and the Haunted Bards Valley, beneath the towering fairy chimneys and starlit skies, EthnoKino invites you into a four-day immersion of film screenings, performances, and conversations that blend myth with memory, ritual with resilience. At a time when mass tourism threatens to erode what remains of Cappadocia’s ecological and cultural integrity, this festival emerges as an act of radical tenderness an invitation to witness differently, to listen deeply, and to reimagine heritage beyond consumption.

In collaboration with Fairy Dust Cappadocia, a visionary platform, this edition opens with a tribute to the region’s sacred pigeon culture once central to farming, spirituality, and poetic ecology.

The festival features The Bird Collective, who perform “Heritage”, the world’s first music album composed entirely of endangered birdsongs and ancient Anatolian instruments. This is not nostalgia it is a living archive, a call to attune ourselves to what still sings.

EthnoKino Cappadocia becomes a sanctuary for stories untold: of mythological love, indigenous memory, threatened species, and the fragile geologies of the self and the soil. Here, cinema becomes a compass for ethical and sustainable tourism, an artistic reckoning with what it means to truly belong to a place without extracting from it.

Come with curiosity. Leave with wonder. Because here in Cappadocia, the wind still whispers, the pigeons still guide, and the stones still dream.

This is not just a festival. It’s a mov(i)ement.