Ecofilms go to unexpected places
The Ecofilms international festival of film and visual art, taking place on Rhodes from June 19-24, promises to take you to unexpected places and modify your normal perception of common concepts. This is not an unreasonable claim for an event that has earned a name for presenting challenging and inspirational films and other visual stimuli. The growing reputation of Ecofilms has attracted submissions of 400 films from around the world this year. Just over 100 of them will screen: three of them as world premieres, 12 as European premieres, and 61 will be seen for the first time in Greece. «Ecofilms as achieved two things,» festival coordinator Nikos Nikolaidis told the press Tuesday. «It has established itself internationally and it has become tied to the city that hosts it. We appreciate the economic sacrifice made by the local administration.» There will be overtly environmental films on subjects ranging from climate change, the threat of desertification, the energy crisis and water resource management. As usual, Ecofilms takes «eco» to include human relationships and activities in the natural and constructed world, as well as the inner human world, and the films to be screened will reflect that broad interpretation. Among this year’s events is a tribute to the veteran photographer and filmmaker Antonis Pahos, who has donated his vast collection of film about Rhodes for an audiovisual archive based on Rhodes. Ecofilms is restoring and digitizing the material to screen at the festival. Other tributes are to French filmmaker Jean Daniel Pollet, who worked for many years in the Dodecanese, and to creative documentaries. And there are still more films through Ecofilms’ new collaborations with the Mediterranean Cinema Institute and the Rhodes Art Gallery, which will run a parallel conference, and with the EU enlargement directorate. The festival is organized by the Municipality of Rhodes and the Image and Environment Society, with the support of the Rhodes Cultural Organization, Dodecanese Prefecture Culture Organization, Ramsar Convention MedWet, Municipal Environmental Organization, Rhodes Cinema Society, the Greek Film Center and the UN environmental program Map.
