Symi International Film Festival 2018

A slight change to our usual Saturday Symi Photos today as there’s news about the 2018 Symi International Film Festival. I’ll be back with updates and photos next week.

Meanwhile, here’s what the film festival organisers have sent me:

Submissions are being accepted through FilmFreeway and Festhome. There are modest fees for entering films into the festival. Just click on one of the links on the website.

Categories:
Short films under 20 minutes
Feature Films
Films made on or about Symi
Premieres (world or in Greece)
Student films (evidence of being a student is compulsory).

Early Deadline 31 May 2018
Standard Deadline 30 June 2018
Final deadline 15 July 2018.

The website is here: http://www.symifilmfestival.com/

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Neil Photos

Suffering a mind blank today and have to get on with the edits for ‘The Witchling’, so will post a few of Neil’s photos for you. These were taken the other day. Maybe I’ll have more to say tomorrow.

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A Walk Along The Lane

Kalo Mina! Just a quick walk along the lane today, but it’s an enjoyable one and one that many visitors to Symi may not know about. It’s easy to find, this lane. Once you are in the village square, head towards Lemonitisa on the path that leads from the western corner of the square. There’s only one way in and one way out of the square, and it’s not the lane that leads towards the shops, so you can’t go wrong.

Its takes an S bend up a slight incline and then slopes upwards a little, but it’s not a steep gradient. You can turn left up some steps and into the other parts of the village, or right and down through the hillside to Yialos. You pass the bins on your left, not the most pleasant of landmarks, but an obvious one. Keep going past a few houses, and you have views down to the sea and the harbour. Further, you come to another corner, and there you can see the back of Yialos and over towards Nimborio and Turkey beyond.

You can also look across to the hills and see terracing and some small farms, a few scattered houses that have been built recently – and I mean one or two built in the last ten years or less, and, if you keep going, you will see the Kataractis and the further hillside of Horio, with the Vigla beyond. You can carry on and then turn left into the back of the village and up to the Castro, or right and down to the back of Yialos on the old and original path to the harbour.

I like this lane and not only because we currently live on it. It gives you great views and has a charm and character, and is unlike many other lanes in the village where there are often walls on either side of you. It’s open and offers both sun and shade along with its views.

There, a quick walk and something else to put on your ‘things to do on Symi’ list for when you come and visit next. You do have a visit planned, don’t you? I hope so.

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A Few Photos

I shouldn’t have mentioned the earworms yesterday. I managed to get rid of them by the evening, but this morning, it’s back to some unwanted Andrew Lloyd Webber and a song from a show I’ve not seen or listened to for years. Argh! So, today, I’m clearing the mind with some photos from January this year. I’ve not got much else to say today thanks to Sunset Boulevard being in my head, but let’s hope you enjoy a quick flick through the images which were taken last week. I am, though, planning a short walk after readying this post, only up the lane and back but it’s a start, may clear the earworms and may give me a few new photos to post here.

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Barbara Allen and The Beetles

(And pics from last week.) Today’s ‘wake up with a tune annoyingly stuck in your head’ game features the old folk song ‘, Barbara Allen.’ This is infinitely better than last week. After watching Barnum, the musical, on one of our Roku channels, I had a pretty decent night’s sleep only to wake up with a song from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat going around in my head with a repetitive four/four (D major). I’d rather have had one of the Cy Coleman numbers, but there you go. Anyway…

On Monday morning, it was Barbara Allen, a song I’ve not heard of played for many years. I had first woken up at 5.20 with the first two lines in my head, unable, in whatever dream I was having, to get to line three. In fact, I’d not correctly dreamt the first line, which is (as I am sure you know), ‘In Scarlet town where I was born.’ I’d remembered, ‘In the town where I was born,’ which then launched a Yellow Submarine into my mind to act in a strange fugue-like way with the folk song. I checked in my books and found, “In Scarlet town where I was born, There was a fair maid dwelling. And every youth cried well away, For her name was Barbara Allen.” (Other versions of the lyric may be available, but this was the version I had.)

So, with Babs-Al, as we used to call her, competing with the Beatles, I tried to get back to sleep, which I did, for another half hour or so. She was still there when I finally leapt gazelle-like out of bed (not) and into my socks, slippers, thermals, two hoodies, hat and gloves ready to start the day. I went and looked her up and realised, though I’d played and enjoyed it 100 times, it’s actually a very sad song. Rich boy is dying, calls for the glorious Babs-Al, she looks at him and says, ‘No hope for you, mate,’ and wanders off the fields, hears the church bell toll, repents and decides she’ll die tomorrow as she really loved him after all. The happy ending is suggested by her green briar and his red rose that grow from their graves (her in the churchyard, him in the choir ‘cos he was rich) to fair swamp the church and its steeple.

It’s a bitter-sweet old song, and easy to play, but I hope that by telling you this, I have now exorcised it from my mind. [Waits a few minutes.] Nope, it’s still there in the town where I wasn’t born with a yellow submarine. But, luckily, no Joseph and his amazingly lucrative costume.

As a follow-up to this ramble, I dug into YouTube to find a version of Barbara Allen that I remembered. Seems like everyone has had a go at it from Joan Baez to Art Garfunkel, and everyone has their own version, including variations on the tune and lyrics. The one I settled on was this. (Click here.) Not me singing, sad to say, and I used to play it in E flat but, there, you can have that stuck in your head now.

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