Camera Zizanio

In our last call for entries for the 10^th Camera Zizanio in early September, we declared that despite the tough economic period, this year’s anniversary organization “could be more glorious than ever”. To many, such a claim seemed in vain. We will disprove them.

Despite the fact that this year we have half the budget, the festive December 2010 will be unlike any other. We have no secret recipe. We simply leave misery aside and with our gaze into the future we make a grand opening to the society and the entire world. This is the result.

• Pirgos’ families, responding to our invitation are making their houses available to host visitors from abroad.
• Dozens of our friends, professionals of cinema and audiovisual education from abroad have offered to operate our workshops without any reward. Some of them come on their own expenses from faraway places such as Canada and Russia, others from less distant ones, like Spain, Hungary and Serbia.
• Greek professionals offer to operate additional cinema workshops for children from all over Greece that will visit the festival, even from locations far away such as Crete and Thrace. Until now, 587 children have registered.
• “Our children”, who were trained in our workshops and have since grown up and made a life for themselves away from home, return and offer to work for the legendary “Zizanio news”, the daily documentary with a different glance to the festival’s life that this year will be broadcasted daily through the frequency of ERT (National Radio and Television).
• Our friend from Hungary, Kálmán Czibolya, with his amazing young camera crew and their high definition equipment, an offer from Sony Hungary, will produce a daily report that will be shown on ERT. The same crew will shoot a documentary for the Hungarian television.
• The entire audiovisual material will be broadcast to the entire world through ERT World and the digital platform “Prisma+”.
• In collaboration with the “Educational Television” and its new youth portal the children’s team of “Zizanio Live”, with the use of up to date technology, will broadcast every day a live program through the internet (live streaming). Through this channel we will be in touch every day with our friends from all around the world. Also, children in Greece will have the chance to attend the cinema workshops live.
• Educational Television is rewarding the youth from Greece that are creating with the use of new media, instituting a new award, through “Camera Zizanio” (next to the “Advocate of the child” award), for the film that stands out for its artistic virtue.
• The radio will not be absent. ERA (National Radio) creates for the first time a radio studio on the site of the festival, where teams of children will be able to create radio programs, while it will be from here that the “Zizanio” radio show will be broadcast.
• ERT and Educational Television will announce two grand competitions for youth videos. The first, aiming at children in Greece, is about “social discrimination”, while the second will have “graffiti” as its subject, it will be international and will take place through internet, for the first time in Greece.

This way, taking advantage of the new ways of communication, we transcend the borders bringing closer tens of thousands of youngsters, their concerns, their thoughts, their dreams. We no longer speak of a festival that takes place in a provincial town, but with Pyrgos and Ancient Olympia as a point of reference it spreads to the entire Greece and all over the world.

The new competitions along with the established awards that are given by “Camera Zizanio”, in the spirit of noble competition and not fruitless antagonism, comprise an important motive for the youngsters to create and an obligation in the state for development of the audiovisual education in a new level.

Camera Zizanio, making another step, opens its European arms to embrace all countries that share our common sea, the Mediterranean.

All these create the frame for “Camera Zizanio Next”, that will be more than a step further – it will be a quality step. It is needed by the next generation; it will be needed by society.

Nikos Theodosiou

Artistic Director