Open Call Little Islands Festival 2024

Little Islands Festival (LIF) is preparing for its new journey and is looking for creators with original ideas that recreate and invent compelling narratives, shared experiences and new worlds. This open call has a direct connection with the research project Homo Narrans implemented with the support of EFFEA “discovery” 2023. For about 8 months the project offered the ground for emerging artists to engage in a creative dialogue with people from the Balkan and Mediterranean regions, highlighting local narratives and new artistic projects based on filmmaking, new media, sound, video and photography.

LIF 2024 expands upon this topic to create an enriched platform for exchange and dialogue that places narrative within the community and simultaneously takes it out of it, stirring up new and multiple realities that play with difference but oppose erasure.

Assuming the world is a set of events signified by words, man’s access to it becomes primordially oral, eliciting the idea not of Homo Sapiens but of Homo Narrans, that “narrative animal” with an irrepressible tendency and need to communicate, interpret and symbolize the world through its stories.

Myths, legends, antiquities, folktales, novels, epics, paintings, and more recently, films, interactive books, video games, interactive narratives, from everyday narrations to scientific theories and the hegemonic narratives through which societies define themselves, man has sought to conjure up fear and time, to transcend anxiety and the unpredictable, to give his life meaning, purpose and intention, to inhabit the world with anthropomorphic actors, to understand it and sometimes to deconstruct it.

Every breakthrough in human society entails a story that was able to sustain from one day to the next, to spread and become the pollinator of a collective drive. Indeed, narrative’s origins coincide with those of humanity, as it is present in every age, place and population, thus confirming the universal human experience of a narrhetic impulse that makes its separation from reality quite challenging.

In defiance of every attempt to demystify and delegitimize it as a source of meaning making, narration does not lose its permeating power but rather transforms and appropriates new channels of communication, always confirming that it is one of the great archetypal activities of man. Balancing between play and order, truth and lies, reality and fantasy, it possesses the unique power to create autonomous spaces of collective communication, enjoyment and celebration.

The new LIF 2024 open call, taking the mythical landscape of Aegean Sea as its inspiration and contemporary art as its medium, seeks to highlight works that unravel the thread of narrative through the past and the future, the visible and the occult, the local and the supra-local, the traditional and the mythical, the natural and the cultural.

What narratives are we in need of to reconnect today?

We address:

Artists from Greece and abroad, art groups, emerging creatives, performers, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, architects, thinkers, activists, scientists, technologists, curators, educators and other creatives working in the field of hybrid practices.

Proposal Categories:

LIF 2024 is seeking proposals that fall into the following categories:

Documentary -Short Films – Animation – Video art – Interactive Film.
AudioVisual Performance – Storytelling Performances – Music – 3D Projection Mapping
Digital Storytelling (Mixed Reality Environments – Virtual Reality – Augmented Reality)
Interactive Installation – Storytelling Workshops for children/adults.

In addition to the screening programme (Short Film, Documentary, animation, video art) which is an important part of the festival, special emphasis will be placed on live act proposals, projects with mixed reality environments and works with a participatory and multi-sensory character.

Themes to be explored:

Cultural heritage, popular culture, oral tradition, collective memory, collective archetypes, nature and environment, futurity.

The selected proposals are scheduled to be presented in the summer of 2024 for the 6th edition of the Little Islands Festival (LIF), in the Cycladic settlement “Castle” of Sikinos and in various locations on the island.

Early Entry Deadline: March 31, 2024

Interested artists can submit their application here: https://filmfreeway.com/LittleIslandsFest