The AleKino! festival celebrated its 40th edition with the animated ECFA Award winner DRAGON PRINCESS (by Jean-Jacques Denis & Anthony Roux, France) and with a new green festival policy.
AleKino! took several transitory steps towards a green event: reducing the amount of goodies for guests (all hail to socks!), recycling gadgets, lanyards and banners from earlier editions, planting trees, reducing supply chains by working with local providers, dropping printouts, encouraging public transport… “We’re only beginning to learn how to organise eco-friendly events. We hope you like the idea,” the festival suggests.
That green policy is in line with the message of this year’s ECFA Award winner. DRAGON PRINCESS tells about a lonely dragon who wishes for children. From his three eggs, two little dragons hatch… and one wild girl with green hair! The forest is hers, but beyond the trees lies the world of humans, who seem to be violent and greedy creatures…
The ECFA Jury were Monika Gorska (Poland), Felix Vanginderhuysen (Belgium) and Pantelis Panteloglou (Greece). DRAGON PRINCESS also won the ZEF Film Educators Award and the Polish Filmmakers Association Award, all three of them collected on stage by director Anthony Roux. The Golden Goat main awards went to TALES OF FRANZ (Johannes Schmid, Austria), MY SMALL LAND (Emma Kawawada, Japan), and the shorts LUCE AND THE ROCK (Britt Raes, Belgium) and TOO ROUGH (Sean Lionadh, Scotland).