Filmmakers from Spain are leading others from Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, UK, France and the US in numbers of movies selected for the forthcoming 3RD EKO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL AT THE SILVERBIRD GALLERIA AND SILVERBIRD CINEMAS LAGOS, FROM NOVEMBER 5-10, 2012.
Spain has 15 films and Nigeria has 6 films. Three of the Nigerian films are going to be premiered at the film festival.
More details on http://www.ekoiff.org/.

Here are the major highlights.

• Red Carpet Opening Ceremony in the atrium of the Silverbird Galleria
• Screenings of 28 selected movies from Nigeria and 12 other countries in Africa, US, UK, France, Spain and others. The event that will be publicized on Silverbird TV, Galaxy TV, BEN TV, SKY TV, BBC, IROKO TV, YouTube Channel, Twitter, Facebook and other websites and reported by Nigerian newspapers and magazines with an aggregate audience of over 3 million readers, 10 million TV viewers and over 43 million people on the internet.
• Distribution of 5,000 copies of the Nollywood Divas Awards magazine to everyone coming to the 6 days film festival.
• Exhibitions and Presentations by Partners and Sponsors
• Workshop on Film making and the New Media
• Distribution of 1000 branded Eko International Film Festival T-Shirts.
• Closing Ceremony with the Awards Gala Night and the crowning of the Nollywood Diva of the Year.

TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE ONLINE AND OFFLINE.

Jim & Joan: A Voodoo Tale (Feature) – Nigeria


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArWDspXFAdk

Synopsis:

A runaway Voodoo priestess is led to a young man. They become a couple and he is trapped in her snare of black magic, lost in her seduction, and supernatural domination he becomes helpless and finds himself a mere instrument in the hand of a higher, darker force and an even more sinister agenda, beyond his wildest imaginations.

Directed by C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi

The Swiss film Operation Libertad has been selected as the Opening Film of the third Eko International Film Festival from November 5-10, 2012, at the Silverbird Cinemas of the prestigious Silverbird Galleria on Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria. The film was premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival with good reviews. 26 other films including features and short films, short and long documentary films and short animations have also been selected for public screenings at the 6 day film festival. The following are some of the films of different genres and from outstanding filmmakers in Nigeria, Switzerland, France, Austria, Mozambique, Spain, UK, Germany, USA, Argentina, Korea, Brazil and other countries.

The following is Cineuropa interview with the Genevan filmmaker Nicolas Wadimoff on Operation Libertad, his first first fiction film.

Cineuropa: Your last films were documentaries. What brought you back to fiction?

[b]Nicolas Wadimoff: [/b]I work in an interrelated way. After two documentaries, I start to feel limited. My desire to put forward a vision, to organise it, becomes an obstacle to my love, as real as it is, for documentary. So I return to fiction. But there too, there is a pendulum effect. As soon as I feel that I am moving too far away from reality, I need to return to it, in one way or another.
Operation Libertad's form reflects this ambivalence. It's a fiction film that looks like a documentary.
Operation Libertad [/i]is indeed the film that most shows this tendency. When Jacob Berger and I worked on the script, we played with this ambivalence. Le film was also shot with an energy similar to that of a documentary. You can also see this in the actors' performances. It's almost not acting. It's almost the actors giving the characters bodily form, rather than them playing a role.
This also allows you to distance yourself from the traditional rules for fiction...
In traditional fiction, the bar is always extremely high in terms of screenplay requirements. Yet, there is nothing worse than profiling oneself in a genre and then not being able to subscribe to it, not being able to make your own mark in it. I'm not saying that I made [i]Operation Libertad [/i]by default because I would rather have made Usual Suspects. That's not it. Simply, wanting to make films in Switzerland is already a strange idea, so dreaming of films with great budgets, complex plots, and tons of comedians would only mean one thing: wasting time.

So you have become more sensitive to a project's feasibility?
Switzerland has space for many other kinds of projects. Sure, with [i]Operation Libertad, I felt especially in tune with the context I live and make films in. It tells our country's story. In it, we touch on bank secrecy, collusions between the Swiss financial system and dictatorships. From a purely pragmatic point of view, we knew that we could make this film here. Cast, budget, production outfit: it was all coherent with the reality of the Swiss film sector.

Let's come back to the film's subject. Where does it come from?
For three years, I worked on a project that was first about an alternative, then a utopia, then an insurrection. The story was set today, and I think I can safely say that I drove two screenwriters to exhaustion trying to make it work. Then, slowly, I started to think about making something in documentary form. I spoke about it to Jacob Berger, who had this idea of a guy who would film, and whose images someone would find. To make it more credible, we decided that the story would be set in the 1970s, at a time when such events could have happened.

How did you research the period?
The screenplay first and foremost comes from meetings, knowledge, and experience. Our own experiences are a little staggered in time: Jacob and I knew the Geneva squat scene very well, but at the beginning of the 1980s. I was involved in the autonomous movement, which was quite radical. In 1994, I also made a documentary for the show Temps présent (lit. "Present time" about the Swiss who had known Carlos. I have stayed in good terms with the film's characters and they were a great inspiration for Operation Libertad.

Your film's subject is not innocent. Your work is about resistance, struggle. Where does this recurrence come from?
I have never managed to detach an individual's issues from those of the world around him. There are people -- filmmakers -- who do this very well. Their business is human relations, psychological or introspective dramas. But, to me, a certain social climate, social issues, are very important both in my life and in my films. How can you break away from your [social] condition? It's probably the question I think about the most.

How did you react to your film being selected for Cannes?
I will not spoil my pleasure. For a long time, I did not give enough importance to recognition via selections and awards. It got the better of me. As I came from a very alternative, anti-media, anti-recognition, and very resistant scene, when [i]Clandestins [/i]was released and won awards, I didn't really know what to think about it. Today, I know that such recognition serves the film and allows you to impose even more daring topics.

The Swiss film Operation Libertad has been selected as the Opening Film of the third Eko International Film Festival from November 5-10, 2012, at the Silverbird Cinemas of the prestigious Silverbird Galleria on Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria. The film was premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival with good reviews. 26 other films including features and short films, short and long documentary films and short animations have also been selected for public screenings at the 6 day film festival. The following are some of the films of different genres and from outstanding filmmakers in Nigeria, Switzerland, France, Austria, Mozambique, Spain, UK, Germany, USA, Argentina, Korea, Brazil and other countries.

The following is Cineuropa interview with the Genevan filmmaker Nicolas Wadimoff on Operation Libertad, his first first fiction film.

Cineuropa: Your last films were documentaries. What brought you back to fiction?

Nicolas Wadimoff: I work in an interrelated way. After two documentaries, I start to feel limited. My desire to put forward a vision, to organise it, becomes an obstacle to my love, as real as it is, for documentary. So I return to fiction. But there too, there is a pendulum effect. As soon as I feel that I am moving too far away from reality, I need to return to it, in one way or another.
Operation Libertad's form reflects this ambivalence. It's a fiction film that looks like a documentary.
Operation Libertad is indeed the film that most shows this tendency. When Jacob Berger and I worked on the script, we played with this ambivalence. Le film was also shot with an energy similar to that of a documentary. You can also see this in the actors' performances. It's almost not acting. It's almost the actors giving the characters bodily form, rather than them playing a role.
This also allows you to distance yourself from the traditional rules for fiction...
In traditional fiction, the bar is always extremely high in terms of screenplay requirements. Yet, there is nothing worse than profiling oneself in a genre and then not being able to subscribe to it, not being able to make your own mark in it. I'm not saying that I made Operation Libertad by default because I would rather have made Usual Suspects. That's not it. Simply, wanting to make films in Switzerland is already a strange idea, so dreaming of films with great budgets, complex plots, and tons of comedians would only mean one thing: wasting time.

So you have become more sensitive to a project's feasibility?
Switzerland has space for many other kinds of projects. Sure, with Operation Libertad, I felt especially in tune with the context I live and make films in. It tells our country's story. In it, we touch on bank secrecy, collusions between the Swiss financial system and dictatorships. From a purely pragmatic point of view, we knew that we could make this film here. Cast, budget, production outfit: it was all coherent with the reality of the Swiss film sector.

Let's come back to the film's subject. Where does it come from?
For three years, I worked on a project that was first about an alternative, then a utopia, then an insurrection. The story was set today, and I think I can safely say that I drove two screenwriters to exhaustion trying to make it work. Then, slowly, I started to think about making something in documentary form. I spoke about it to Jacob Berger, who had this idea of a guy who would film, and whose images someone would find. To make it more credible, we decided that the story would be set in the 1970s, at a time when such events could have happened.

How did you research the period?
The screenplay first and foremost comes from meetings, knowledge, and experience. Our own experiences are a little staggered in time: Jacob and I knew the Geneva squat scene very well, but at the beginning of the 1980s. I was involved in the autonomous movement, which was quite radical. In 1994, I also made a documentary for the show Temps présent (lit. "Present time" about the Swiss who had known Carlos. I have stayed in good terms with the film's characters and they were a great inspiration for Operation Libertad.

Your film's subject is not innocent. Your work is about resistance, struggle. Where does this recurrence come from?
I have never managed to detach an individual's issues from those of the world around him. There are people -- filmmakers -- who do this very well. Their business is human relations, psychological or introspective dramas. But, to me, a certain social climate, social issues, are very important both in my life and in my films. How can you break away from your [social] condition? It's probably the question I think about the most.

How did you react to your film being selected for Cannes?
I will not spoil my pleasure. For a long time, I did not give enough importance to recognition via selections and awards. It got the better of me. As I came from a very alternative, anti-media, anti-recognition, and very resistant scene, when Clandestins was released and won awards, I didn't really know what to think about it. Today, I know that such recognition serves the film and allows you to impose even more daring topics.

Last Kiss in Rome (Fiction) - Spain

SYNOPSIS
Anna and Enrico are two young lovers that want to escape together but need to solve their economic problems first. Enrico receives a wealthy offer from a mysterious but he refuses this offer thinking his friend Paolo will lend him some money. Tragedy appears in a dark roman night to discover the true meaning of love, friendship and revenge.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0IEfuC8ya8

Directed by Carla Vadell

Heroes & Zeros (Feature) – Nigeria


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIFTxEGk7Oc

SYNOPSIS
Heroes and Zeros is the story of destructive pursuance of Tonia (Nadia Buari) by Amos Fele (Bimbo Manuel). Ten years ago, Amos Fele was a wealthy celebrity director in the Nigerian film industry. Now he lives in a ramshackle flat, doing occasional low-paying TV commercials for nameless products. He’s a daily comic relief on the local soccer practice pitch: because though he’s already 45 years old, he nurses a new, insane dream of making it into the dollar-soaked world of international soccer! His joyless marriage to Tinuke (Tina Mba), a junior bank worker, is crumbling fast, especially after the death of their only child.

Directed by Niji Akanni

Latest news on https://www.nairaland.com/1093961/3rd-eko-international-film-festival

Heineken Nigeria and Starcom Media supported the third Eko International Film Festival.
Photo shows the Founder/Festival Director Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima with Mrs. Kehinde Ebuoma of Heineken Nigeria and Mrs. Bukola of Starcom Media on the closing day Saturday November 10, 2012, at the Silverbird Galleria on Victoria Island, Lagos.

Happy movie lovers at the grand finale.