Mallorca is a nice autumn retreat from cold rainy Germany. In late October the Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival (EMIFF) has its traditional spot, located in beautiful Palma de Mallorca. Over its 14 years of history, EMIFF has established itself as a community focused film festival, attracting people from all over the world. This year, 130 productions from 30 countries are being presented, selected from a 1000+ submissions from films, documentaries, shorts and music videos. This is my third time at EMIFF and the number of connections I make with regular guests is growing, making this a more fun event to hang out at :)

The festival started yesterday, October 21 with the grand opening gala at the Palau de Congressos. They moved the opening gala from Teatro Principal to the local congress centre to accommodate the growing number of guests, and also to provide a larger room inside for chats and connecting with the participants, which worked out well. Neither Teatro Principal nor Palau de Congressos are dedicated cinemas, which unfortunately leads to a less great experience for the actual movie watching. The first half of the event was anyway reserved for the opening speeches and for giving awards to some distinguished guests.

I’m not a film fanatic like most of the people at the festival, so I’m most often completely stupid about who is on stage. Well, this time at least I knew one of the award winner. Steve Buscemi got the Evolution Icon award for his body of work produced in the last 4 decades he has been in business, which was given to him by Column Meaney. The guys know each other from the years and you could see them hanging out afterwards with their wives chatting for quite some time. Buscemi is such an icon, who for sure deserves the award, and his acceptance speech connected with the audience.

Now I didn’t know the other 2 award winners by name, but Phedon Papamichael now a name I remember :) He got the Cinematography Icon award for his work which includes Sideways, one of my favorite movies. Today is the screening of A Complete Unknown, his latest work as DP which I’m looking forward to see. The Evolution New Talent award was given to Ingrid García-Jonsson.

The movie of the Opening Gala was Los Domingos, a Spanish production about the about the struggles of a 17 year old girl, getting acceptance in their family for her decision to become a nun. Not my type of coffee, and as mentioned already with the subpar screening equipment, I decided not to watch the whole movie but instead hang out with friends and creatives outside.

Just as a last thought, I noticed a lot of young people in their early 20ties at the Opening Gala and also today at a Cinematography event, participating and being engaged in Q&A sessions. I’ve seen a couple of communities and industries that fail to attract young folks in larger volume and it is refreshing and gives one hope that despite the monumental shift that this industry and art is going to experience in the next couple of years, it still attract young talents. I’m curious to see how they will adopt new tools that will be omnipresent in a couple of years.