Artistic directors
Our Mission
The Festival aims to broaden its appeal within the geographical boundaries of Cyprus, as well as to attract both industry professionals and audiences from abroad by becoming a cinematographic meeting point for the three continents surrounding the island.
The Festival aims at:
- contributing to the development, promotion and mobility of the art of Filmmaking in Cyprus and the wider region;
- screening the work of filmmakers from across the world and introducing their work to the audience of Cyprus;
- serving as a hub for films originating from the three neighbouring continents of Cyprus.
Costas Constandinides is a Screen Studies Scholar, whose work focuses on the move of fictional and factual content across media, and on screen media practices within the context of transnational screen cultures. He is the author of From Film Adaptation to Post-celluloid Adaptation (Continuum, 2010/Bloomsbury, 2012) and co-editor (with Yiannis Papadakis) of Cypriot Cinemas: Memory, Conflict and Identity in the Margins of Europe (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is a member of the European Film Academy and Co-artistic Director of Cyprus Film Days FF since 2009.
Tonia Mishiali is a writer/director and producer, member of the Hellenic and European Film Academies, Berlinale Talents alumna, and one of the artistic directors of Cyprus Film Days IFF. Her work has been awarded the FIPRESCI Prize among many others and received rave reviews from the trades and other established media such as Hollywood Reporter and Screen International. Pause, which was also her directorial debut, was listed one of “20 most daring films of 2019” by Rotten Tomatoes. Her films have been officially selected in prestigious and ‘A’ list film festivals like Locarno, Karlovy Vary, Cairo, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, Seattle, Sarajevo, Sofia, Transilvania, Stockholm, as well as Sydney, at which she was selected in the European Film Promotion’s ``Europe! voices of women in film`` section, where films by Europe's ten most outstanding women directors were presented. Her films have been released theatrically worldwide, while streaming on major platforms (HBO Europe, Amazon Prime USA). Her projects have been developed, presented and awarded at workshops and international markets such as cocoPITCH, Karlovy Vary WIP, Midpoint, Torino Film Lab, Crossroads, Sources2, Mediterranean Film Institute, Euroconnection, Sofia Meetings and Meetings on the bridge. She is now developing a number of short and feature films by other directors under her own production label ‘Bark Like A Cat Films’, including her own next two feature films titled Nala and Stella (Crossroads) and Maya (awarded at Sofia Meetings).
Marios Stylianou was born in 1962 in the now-occupied city of Famagusta. Son of well-known photographer, Nicos Stylianou, he grew up in a photographic environment, inspired on a daily basis by the art of Photography. He studied Photography and Cinema at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne/Western Germany and completed his studies with a thesis on the creation of TV commercials. In 1989, he established MS Viewpoint, a company specialising in the production of TV commercials. Since then, he continues to be widely present in the field, producing and directing famous and successful TV commercials for the Cypriot TV, broadcast both in Cyprus and abroad: in Greece, Lebanon, UAE, Russia, Malta, Germany and other European countries. Among these commercials, seven TV advertisements were selected for the final stage of the London International Advertising Awards, and three others were among the finalists of ERMIS Awards in Greece. Throughout his career, he has produced TV commercials for the most important institutions and organisations in Cyprus, collaborated with various private companies and taught photography and video production in Europa College, Cyprus College and Intercollege. Since 2012, he has been giving lectures at the University of Nicosia in the Design and Multimedia Department, where he teaches Production of TV Commercials, as well as Digital Cinematography in the Communications Department of the same university.