NEWS

Ülker Children's Cinema Festival, an event children look forward to every year, reached out to 63 cities during the week of April 23. Starting in 33 cities in 2008, the festival has grown larger every year since, and has spread to other cities with movie theaters. Thanks to the Festival, children had the opportunity to watch The Reef 2 free of charge on a particular day. The movie is set to open this year in 159 movie theaters across 63 cities, and in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. As the farthest-reaching children's event throughout Türkiye, Ülker Children's Cinema Festival brought the excitement of cinema to 912,000 people - 750,000 of them children - over six years. The Festival aims to increase this figure to 1 million people in 2015.

Ülker Children's Cinema Festival expanded to new cities each year since it began in 2008, and now covers 77 percent of Türkiye, from Denizli and Van to Giresun and Muş. This year, new cities included Ağrı, where their first movie theater just opened, along with Kars and Amasya. A team of 650 people, including personnel from Yıldız Holding companies, organized the festival, which is one of the most far-reaching social responsibility projects in Türkiye, offering equal opportunity to all children.  

In the same manner, we organized a very special activity for the children of Kars.  For the first time, children enjoyed watching a movie without having to pay for it. They grabbed the Ülker gift packages leaving the theaters, and then wore themselves out running between the slide, painting workshop, face painting activity, balloon seller, and kite workshop. Everything in this Festival was in place to make the children happy. 

Significant increases in the number of movie goers were recorded during the Ülker Children's Cinema Festival this year, especially in Anatolia. It is a pleasure to see the increase in Anatolia…  Before we initiated this project, the number of movie goers in Anatolia was around 33 percent.  During the five years the Festival has been held, this figure rose to nearly 45 percent.Thus far, we have won over the hearts of 912,000 people, of which 750,000 were children and 162,000 were parents. This is a true gift for us... Our goal is to make 1 million children happy in 2015. 

I would like to share a customer's thank you note sent to the Customer Communication Center. This is what our little movie goer said:  "I can only thank you for giving us, the children who have never been inside a movie theater, the pleasure of experiencing this happiness. Thanks to you, my dad can now take me to the movies." 

We would like to extend our thanks to all Yıldız Holding personnel for the effort they have put into this project, and hope to collaborate with them on many other successful projects.