Work Aegean Film Festival
Aegean Film Festival, 2023
A festival that looks like film, not film stars
- Sector
- Culture
- What we did
- Identity, posters, motion titles
- Where
- The quay at Ermoupoli, Syros
- How long
- 8 weeks, and every July since
A week of films on a harbour quay, with an identity built from the film strip instead of borrowed faces.
€4,200from poster sales, enough to pay for the next year's printing
The brief
The festival had no budget for image rights. Each year it printed a new poster with whichever actor it could get permission for, and nobody recognised it from one summer to the next.
The real problem
Without faces, what makes a film festival look like a film festival?
What we did
We went back to the strip. Each year's programme sets the bars: one strip per film, its width from the running time, frames punched where the film is shown outdoors. Posters, tickets, the programme and the opening titles all come from the same generator, so the festival's two volunteers can make a new poster in an afternoon.
What we made
On the wall
Every direction with a face in it was out by the end of week one.
Every Friday at four, each project in progress is pinned up at real size. Why we print it
What changed
Three editions on, people collect the posters. The 2025 set sold out as prints at the box office and paid for the next year's printing.
People queue for the posters now. We used to beg shops to put them up.