Evia Film Project, Thessaloniki Film Festival’s green initiative forged in the aftermath of the calamitous wildfires on the Greek island of Evia in 2021, focused primarily on location scouting this year.
“It was the most important action of this project because it’s about the future and this is the most important thing. How can we leave a trace here? And a trace will be a movie, a TV series, a documentary…,” says Thessaloniki Film Festival topper Orestis Andreadakis.
Two Fam Trips – familiarization tours of locations – a town walk and a masterclass were organized for the location scouts and managers, and other film professionals attending the event. The Fam Trips aimed to give prominence to the physiognomy of Northern Evia and highlight locations in the municipalities of Istiea Edipsos and Mantoudi-Limni-Agia Anna, while the walk around the town of Loutra Edipsos showcased empty buildings, beaches, thermal baths and other hidden treasures.
“The island of Northern Evia has a variety of physical locations such as mines, lakes, beaches with an apocalyptic, dystopian background, but also buildings and mansions from the 1800s, such as the Candili Estate, that can double for U.K. country houses or houses in Long Island and New York, according to the location managers that participated in the Fam Trips,” says Hellenic Film Commission operations manager, Stavroula Geronimaki.
As a substantial part of Ruben Östlund’s Oscar-nominated and Palme d’Or and EFA-winning film “Triangle of Sadness” was shot on Evia, from Sept. 18 to Oct. 28, 2020, a masterclass conducted by Heretic line producer Danae Spathara and location manager Menelaos Mytilineos concluded the three-day location showcase and focused on the practical aspect of location scouting of that particular production. The two delved into the production process as well as the challenges they faced amidst the obstacles that emerged due to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent restrictions. One of the Evia shooting locations was the beach of Chiliadou that won the 2022 EUFCN Location Award.
“We shot ‘Triangle of Sadness’ both on mountains and in valleys,” Spathara tells PvNew. “What is really interesting, and cannot be very easily found in many countries, is how beautiful mountain and beach locations can be found in very close proximity, so you don’t have to run from one side of the island to the other to find a beautiful mountain near a beautiful beach, and this is what happened with ‘Triangle of Sadness,’ with a beautiful mountain next to a beautiful beach. We wouldn’t have been able to shoot the film without the help of the local community and the authorities were really helpful and contributed to that success.”
The Fam Trips were such a success that Thessaloniki Film Festival is considering making them a permanent feature of the project, “and even organiz[ing] that kind of trip in other areas of Greece, in central Macedonia where our H.Q. is, in Crete, on the islands, in the Peloponnese…” Andreadakis shares.
The locations activities were carried out with the support of the Hellenic Film Commission, which has been running the Location Scouting Support Program, assisting projects interested in conducting preliminary location scouting in Greece.
