Founded in 2013, from July 3 to 12,
Syros International Fim Festival (SIFF) will bring Greek and international independent film to Syros through two competition sections, thematic screenings, workshops, talks and parallel exhibitions. Both traditional and re-purposed spaces around Syros (especially in the main town, Hermoupolis) are used for screenings in an effort to bring attention to the island’s rich historical, cultural and architectural past and present. In the years to come, SIFF aims to make Syros a destination for film and visual art in Greece and the broader region.
Moving around the theme of ΄place΄, the organizers will present a thematic program consisting of films contemporary and classic, documentary and fiction, Greek and international, short and long. The program draws films together based on their novel and fascinating relationships to the notion of place. The Where: Cinemas of Place program, comprises of the following sections: Interior/Exterior: Room Films, Lands and Locality, The Nowhere Place: Road Films and the Film-Space/Film-Place sections.
Corneliu Porumboiu
The other special event highlighting 2015΄s edition, will be the first major retrospective of the acclaimed Romanian filmmaker
Corneliu Porumboiu (Cannes, Camera d’Or, Jury Prize, and Un Certain Talent) in collaboration with the Romanian Embassy. Porumboiu will attend the event.
SIFF 2015 is also presenting its
two annual awarded international competitions, one of feature-length directorial debuts from around the world and the other of short films from the Mediterranean region. The feature competition is sponsored by
2|35, an Athens based production company, while three remarkable filmmakers will preside over the festival΄s jury: Greek director
Constantinos Giannaris, Spanish producer Luis Miñarro and Lynne Ramsay, filmmaker from Scotland.
The Onassis Cultural Center/Onassis Foundation is the main sponsor of SIFF’s 2015 edition. Other partners include to US Embassy in Athens, the Romanian Embassy, the Aegean Region, the Syros Municipality and the Greek Film Center.
Peter Greenaway
Below are the rest of the highlights from the 2015 program:
SIFF’s inaugural lecture series hosted at the Apollon Theater, exploring the transition from film to digital. The speakers are Peter Greenaway, Albert Serra, Louis Benassi and
Electra Venaki.
Maki Opening Night. French cinema performance group Maki will orchestrate a live performance of 16mm projection in the shadow of the historic lighthouse island opposite Hermoupolis.
A constructed drive-in cinema screening a selection of road films (a special event within the Cinemas of Place program), ranging from classics to obscure gems.
One Off, a non-traditional look at American cinema through the films of directors that only ever completed one film.
