24/06/2015 - The indie-minded film gathering focuses on the film-to-digital transition, with Peter Greenaway as its head panellist

Focusing on the film-to-digital transition, the Syros International Film Festival (3-12 July) will celebrate its third edition by furthering its effort to create a relationship between its eclectic screening schedule and the island's picturesque surroundings, which serve as alternative screening venues.

Peter Greenaway will be this year's main guest, as the great Brit will be headlining a set of panels seeking to map cinema's transition from film to digital. Spanish director Albert Serra, British film scholar Louis Benassi and local documentarian Eva Stefani will round off the panel. 

The festival’s complete retrospective dedicated to Romanian New Wave hero and Cannes Caméra D'Or winner Corneliu Porumboiu will be this year's main sideline attraction, the One Off programme will highlight American one-hit wonders such as Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a plethora of shorts produced in the Mediterranean will populate the gathering's short-film competition section, while first-time directors will go head to head in the main competition branch, aptly titled Debuts. 

Adding to the event's attractions is the island's wealth of unconventional locations, which helped to shape the rest of the programme: an empty lot inspired organisers to set up a series of drive-in screenings dubbed Road Films (comprising such gems as Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and John Ford's Stagecoach), while the image of a blooming field appeared to be the ideal locale for a series of cinema-performances, headlined by French-based group Maki, who have been tapped to star in the gathering’s opening-night gala.