On the occasion of the screening of the three films competing this year for the LUX Prize, awarded each year by the European Parliament, a press conference took place on Wednesday 8 November 2017, at Warehouse C, as part of the 58th Thessaloniki International Film Festival.
The three competing films for the LUX Prize, which will be hosted in this year’s event, are the following: BPM (Beats per Minute) by Robin Campillo (France), which is already released in Greek cinemas, Amanda Kernell’s Sami Blood (Sweden-Denmark-Norway), which won last year’s 57th TIFF “Human Values Award” of the Hellenic Parliament, and Western by Valeska Grisebach (Germany-Bulgaria-United Kingdom) which premieres in this year’s festival edition. The LUX award ceremony will take place on Wednesday 15 November 2017 during the EP plenary session in Strasbourg.
TIFF’s head of programming and member of the panel selecting the films for the LUX Prize Yorgos Krassakopoulos was the press conference moderator, and welcomed Leonidas Antonakopoulos, Head of the European Parliament Office in Greece, to the panel of the event.
Yorgos Krassakopoulos stressed that it’s the sixth year in a row that the TIFF hosts the three shortlisted films of the LUX Prize, an initiative that began 11 years ago. Consequently, Mr Antonakopoulos talked about the European Parliament’s contribution to this attempt to spread and disseminate the good quality European cinema. He added that the European Parliament covers the cost of subtitling the three finalist films in all 24 EU official languages and gives thus the opportunity to every EU citizen to watch them in their language. “This initiative surpasses the narrow artistic limits and reflects the multiculturalism which consists the real foundation of Europe and the EU. All competing films, and not solely the three shortlisted ones, manifest the European values, as they are reflected in the concepts of solidarity, tolerance, freedom of speech, and human rights protection. The European Parliament aspires to act as these values’ guardian”, Mr Antonakopoulos added.
Immediately afterwards, Mr Krassakopoulos described the finalist films selection procedure, during which a 21-member panel composed of people working in various cinematic professions -producers, programmers, critics, film directors- select films out of a long list, end up initially in 10, and then in three, which compete for the LUX Prize. Nevertheless, the final selection will not be made by the initial panel, but by the MEPs, who watch the three films and vote. “We are trying to find a happy medium between content and artistic value, so that each selected film addresses a topic that concerns today’s Europe, and at the same time is up to high artistic standards”, he added.
On his turn, Leonidas Antonakopoulos noted: “The European Parliament’s relation with cinema is now a procedure fully integrated to the organizational structure of the EU. The appeal of LUX Prizes within the Parliament gets bigger every year, as is the the MEPs’ participation. I must also say that the Education and Culture Committee’s work is in the right direction, as is the European Commission’s Creative Europe program. Our immediate plans include collaboration with even more institutions, in order to create more platforms for interaction and dissemination of good quality cinema in all 28 EU member states”, he concluded.
