Another award for The Interview at Sea, which now sails through the Aegean Sea too
Among all the updates we’re sharing quite late (such as the one at the beginning of this article), the news of the selection and award received at the Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival is perhaps the most surprising. We received word of the selection—and soon after, the award—from the Athenian festival in the very last days of 2024. We didn’t announce it immediately because we hoped to catch up on all outstanding work by January. That didn’t happen, and in February we only managed to publish the news of our participation in another major event: the Los Angeles Italia – Film, Fashion and Art Festival, which we had to highlight also for its online streaming component (here is the link to the article). A full report on that festival is coming soon.
he final event of the Athens International Art Film Festival took place in the Greek capital on March 23, 2025. The Interview at Sea was awarded the important recognition of an Honorable Mention in the documentary category. In other words, the film received a special award for its merit.
Once again, we weren’t able to attend the ceremony in person to collect the beautiful trophy.
Winning another award was, of course, a great joy—but what pleased us even more was the opportunity to bring our story, after reaching the northern seas of Europe—such as Iceland and Wales (see articles [here] and [here])—into the heart of the Mediterranean, in Southern Europe. Greece, along with Italy, is the only Mediterranean-facing European country with a significant fishing fleet. France and Spain, by contrast, have primarily developed ocean-going fisheries. While Greece’s production levels don’t match Italy’s—its fleet being mostly artisanal—it shares many of the same challenges (and frictions with European policies) that are deeply explored in The Interview at Sea.
But the voyage of The Interview at Sea into the Aegean is not just metaphorical or symbolic of this new festival stop. One of the film’s most important case studies was filmed in Mazara del Vallo, on board one of the large Sicilian trawlers that travel across the entire Mediterranean on extended red shrimp fishing campaigns, which can last from four weeks up to four months. The Aegean is not only one of the seas where these vessels operate, but Greece—and more specifically the island of Crete—is also a strategic logistical base for such long expeditions.
We’ll have the opportunity to explore all of this in more technical depth in the book we mentioned in the previous article.
At this point in our catch-up plan, there’s still one more report to come—along with one last, important announcement about a new festival that has taken The Interview at Sea to incredibly distant waters and to another island… but not just any island: in fact, the largest of them all!
