Apostolos Kouroupakis
The 21st International Film Days Festival - Cyprus 2023 is set to begin on Friday, April 21st, at the Rialto Theatre in Limassol and the Zina Pallas in Nicosia. The festival will run until April 29th and is expected to feature many interesting screenings. During the festival, four awards will be presented, including the Best Film Award Glocal Images, Special Jury Award Glocal Images, Best Director Award Glocal Images, and the Authorwave Award. The Best Film Award and Special Jury Award are accompanied by cash prizes of €6,000 and €3,000, respectively, payable equally to the producer and director. The Best Director Award is accompanied by a cash prize of €1000. The Authorwave Prize is accompanied by post-production services worth €4000. Honorary distinctions will also be presented but will not include any cash prizes.
The festival's new artistic directors, Marios Lizidis and Argyro Nicolaou, have chosen films that address important socio-political issues, including xenophobia, militarization, abuse of the environment, social isolation due to technological means, the violation of human rights, freedom of expression, gender equality, and the recognition of non-gender identities and sexuality. They said in a recent interview that they aim to harness the power of cinema to imagine a better and different future in a world that repeatedly underestimates the value of individual and collective life, succumbing to the destructive rather than creative impulse of humanity.
The five-member international jury of the festival is composed of prominent personalities from the international film scene. The jury will be in Cyprus throughout the festival and will announce the winners of the Glocal Images competition section on April 29th at the Rialto Theatre during the Closing Ceremony. This year's jury is chaired by the internationally acclaimed French director Julie Bertuccelli, accompanied by the experienced talent agent Georg Georgi (Germany), the head of the Berlinale's Generation section Sebastian Markt, MoMA's film exhibition curator Sophie Cavoulacos (USA), and the award-winning Cypriot director Yanna Americannou.
All the films screened in the Glocal Images international competition, plus three fiction films screened outside the official competition, will compete for the Audience Award, which is judged by the audience immediately after each screening. The award is accompanied by a cash prize of €500, sponsored by the Limassol Municipality. The prizes awarded by the International Jury are in the form of a Neolithic anthropomorphic figure, exact copies of a stone figurine found in the Neolithic settlement of Choirokoitia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, dating from 7000-6000 BC.
The detailed program of the Festival is available on the website cyprusfilmdays.com.
