The Festival Image: Elegant Gaze

Insisting on Life

We live in a time when the flow of daily news feels unrelentingly grim. Images of death and destruction dominate our screens. Social and political norms once taken for granted are openly violated. Boundaries, borders and attitudes are shifting, and certainty feels increasingly elusive. In such conditions, joy appears to be the privilege of too few. In times like these, to insist on life is not naïve. It is necessary. It is, in fact, a radical act.

This conviction lies at the heart of the Cyprus Film Days 2026, marking the festival’s 24th edition. 

Cinema, as an art form, embraces this insistence wholeheartedly. By reanimating historical moments long gone, or by placing marginalised experiences at the centre of the frame, film affirms the irreducible value of living. It reminds us that every life carries weight, dignity and meaning, and that every story deserves to be told.

Life, Presence and Resistance

Cyprus Film Days 2026 celebrates the resistance embodied by every living being. At a moment when simulations threaten to replace reality and machines increasingly mimic intelligence, the festival foregrounds the flesh and blood, body and soul, feelings and consciousness that define life itself. These are elements that cinema, at its best, captures with singular intensity. If this year’s programme honours life’s persistence in the face of erasure, the festival’s visual identity gives this idea tangible form.

The Festival Image: Elegant Gaze

The official poster for CFD 2026, designed by Philippos Vassiliades, draws from the work of artist Sergis Hadjiadamos. The image affirms that the creative act can give life to what time has damaged, and that presence can survive through fragments, gestures and gazes.

Titled Elegant Gaze, the artwork emerges from the fragile world of century-old glass negatives belonging to the archive of Cypriot photographer Spyros Haritou. From this delicate archive, a young woman’s portrait surfaces. One surviving eye carries the full weight of presence. Her mouth is gently obscured by an unexpected hand, while behind her, the faint silhouette of a suited man drifts in and out of recognition.

The image unfolds like a frame from an unwritten film: intimate, dreamlike, and suspended between clarity and dissolution. What time has erased becomes a space for imagination, inviting viewers to read emotion through fragments. 

In Elegant Gaze, memory becomes cinematic. The image lingers, hovers and searches, echoing the way cinema captures faces, gestures and moments that might otherwise disappear. It is a quiet invitation to look deeper, to recognise humanity in the incomplete, and to honour stories that survive not in perfection, but in the fragile traces time allows to remain.

Info

The festival is held with the support and auspices of the Deputy Ministry of Culture and is co-organised with Rialto Theatre.

The 24th Cyprus Film Days will take place from 17 to 25 April 2026 at Rialto Theater and Zena Palace.

Information: Rialto Theatre 77 77 77 45
www.cyprusfilmdays.com

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