Common Baltic. Short Film Contest – a Month by the Baltic Sea
Culture.pl, the Gdynia Film Festival, the Pomeranian Film Foundation and the Gdynia Film School announce a contest for a short film devoted to the identity of the Baltic Sea countries. The films that may be submitted to the contest have to be 1-5 min long and touch upon the theme of the Baltic Sea region – its culture, cultural identity, history, society, constant transformation. The contest’s participants have a month for preparing their films – 4 summer holiday weeks, which many inhabitants of this region of Europe associate with the very Baltic Sea. We encourage to use this time to reflect upon the faces of the Baltic Sea region, its identity and to translate this to the language of the film. The contest’s formula is open: both professionals and amateurs from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Russia – inhabitants of Kaliningrad and the St-Petersburg area– and Poland can participate.
As dr Włodzimierz Pessel, PhD in Scandinavian studies, writes, “It’s been a quarter of a century since the Baltic Sea ceased to be a buffer (…). The great transformation of Central and Eastern Europe fulfilled the dreams of free flows and allowed the Baltic Sea to serve its natural function from a cultural relations potential standpoint – it is now an inland, regional basin, and so it is favourable to intense neighbourhood. Indeed, the Scandinavians and Germans call it a lake (Swedish ‘Östersjön’, German ‘Ostsee’), traditionally it is called ‘The Mediterranean Sea of Northern Europe’. It seems that this multifacetedness and multiculturalism has been brought back (…). The time has come for young and creative people, the film art adepts, to think of what it is actually that the seaside neighbourhood consists in. Does our Baltic world fulfil the “family Europe” demand submitted years ago by the Nobel-prizewinner Czesław Miłosz?”
The films can be submitted until 25th August via the Culture.pl website, where a special form has been created. The best films will be chosen by the jury composed of:
- Leszek Kopeć – the Chairman of the Jury, the Director of the Gdynia Film Festival and the Board Chairman of the Pomeranian Film Foundation
- Magnus von Horn – a Swedish film director living in Poland. A graduate and lecturer of the Polish Film School in Łódź. His last film “The Here After” had its world premiere at the 68th Film Festival in Cannes.
- Olga Wysocka – the Deputy Director at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute
- Grzegorz Skorupski – the film expert at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Awards for the authors of the best films will be given out in September during the 40th Gdynia Film Festival. The Common Baltic Contest is a part of the cultural programme held by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute under the flagship Culture.pl brand in the Baltic Sea region. After the Eastern Partnership and Asia, this is yet another area of a long-term enhanced activity of the Institute, with international cultural and socio-cultural projects held. The project involves: Poland, Russia (Kaliningrad and the St-Petersburg area), Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Iceland.
