Inspired from the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, and mainly from the fact that I will watch a Greek movie tonight in the IFFR, I thought that this is an interesting post.

It is a nice example of how crowdfunding can contribute to culture…and academia. Alithea Avramis is a Greek-American Master student of UCLA’s honored School of Theater, Film, and Television, in California. One of her dreams was to shoot a film in Greece, and more specifically in Mani, a geographical region in Greece. Mani is a central peninsula, which extend southwards from Peloponese in southern Greece. Although Avramis was born in the US, she has a great interest for her Greek roots, and she decided to do her Master Thesis project, which actually is a short movie, in Mani. The short movie deals with the Greek temperament and way of living within the economic crisis in a small village close to Mani, which suffers from depopulation, but all these through a comedy spirit! The point is: who would fund this project?

The solution came up from crowdfunding. After she uploaded a short video on www.indiegogo.com, an international funding platform, where she explained the reason she wanted to be funded to make this film, users of the website started to fund the project. As a result, Avramis reached the amount of money needed to finance her project. The film has been already completed, since September 2011, and it is ready to travel in many film festivals around the world, while its director is entitled as a Master graduate!

I apologize to my non-Greek speaking colleagues, because the above link is from a Greek newspaper and it is only in Greek.

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