Symi International Film Festival
Here’s a quick update on the Symi International Film Festival to be held on the island in September. “We have 210 films from 47 countries to choose from. The quality is exceptional, which makes the selection even more difficult. We now have four weeks to make our choices. The quality makes it very difficult. We would love to show more, but the screening time is just not available. We have 100 hours of runtime submitted but just 15 hours of screen time available.”
I don’t envy the committee the job, though I do envy them being able to view all these excellent submissions. The festival is held at the village sports complex, outside in the courtyard, under the stars where the films are projected onto a large screen. I believe that the films also must be subtitled and that they come from a variety of countries, offering a truly international flavour. The showings are usually in the early evening, but more details will be put up here when I learn them, and there will, no doubt, be posters to come in due course.
I am also waiting to catch new of the Symi Festival, the music, dance and arts festival that usually happens around August. I’ll share info about that as soon as I see any.
Meanwhile, I am having something of a festival of time off, kind of. I’m ‘between books’, the literary equivalent of a resting actor, I suppose, though it’s not very restful. After six months of hard slog on four stores that just fell out, I now have to decide what I want to do next, or else, wait for inspiration to strike. Meanwhile, I write for a couple of hours every day, and even if it’s not used, what comes out is a good practice session, and you never know, may lead to something interesting. There’s nothing as inspirational as a blank page.
