The biggest and biggest youth film festival in Greecethe 26th Olympia International Film Festival for Children and Youth, focusing on Pyrgos and Amaliada, will present on December 2-9 a rich program of films for children, teenagers and the whole family, with free admission.

The great youth festival of cinema consists of 3+1 pillars: The 26th Olympia International Film Festival for Children and Youth, the 23rd European Meeting of Young Audiovisual Creation Camera Žizanio, School Cinema – cinema education actions, as well as actions for film professionals and educational.

Films from all over the world will be screened this year in at least 10 cities, since in addition to the classic central activities in Pyrgos and Amaliada, screenings will also take place in Lechaina, Gastouni, Zacharo and Bartholomew in the regional unit of Ilia, as well as the Patras, Agrinio, Messolonghi, Aegio, Zakynthos and elsewhere.

On December 9-17, 2023, the Festival’s digital platform online.olympiafestival.gr will host an exciting program of short films from the competition programs, aimed at children and young people throughout the country. Besides its entertainment role, the Olympia festival is also known for education, with remote schools and children with limited access to the cultural product.

Carefully selected by the Festival’s artistic director Dimitris Spyrou, the films in the program deal with everything that concerns children and young people in the modern world: friendship, family, love, relationships, school, social media but also war, loss, pandemic, abuse … films that praise the joy of life and others that dare to show the sufferings of our times and the human condition, without “make-up” reality for children.

The opening ceremony will feature the film Perlimps, the new masterpiece by Ale Ambreu (“The boy and the world”) which premiered in Annecy. In addition, we will see for the first time the film that resulted from the collaboration of the Olympia Festival with the National Opera, as part of the educational program “Lyric Micromekades».

In this program, a group of children from Pyrgos worked with ELS teachers Dimitra Trypani and Iro Bezou in Pyrgos and at the National Opera and created a hybrid mini-opera that the director Alexandros Voulgaris (The Boy) “transformed” into a short film in the form of a video clip.

The closing ceremony will also feature the videodance film produced as a creative culmination of the inclusive movement and music workshop “A moving body that sounds and connects” held in Patras with the participation of teenagers with and without visual and hearing disabilities. Iota Peklari (choreographer-dance teacher) and Chrysanthi Badeka (choreographer-filmmaker) were in charge of the workshop.

You will find information about the films of the competition programs, parallel actions and screenings here:

Φεστιβάλ Ολυμπίας

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