Fifty Times More than Just a Festival

Academia Film Olomouc (AFO) is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2015. However, this festival of popular science films has long been a significant exhibition of audiovisual communication of science in the European context.

Festival Director Matěj Dostálek, who became involved in the organisation of the event already as a student in 2007, will be in charge of AFO’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. “2007 was the first year it was organised by the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the Faculty of Arts. According to statistics, there was a record number of 670 accredited visitors in that year,” recalled Dostálek.

Seven years later and the number is six times higher; there were 4,067 accreditations for this year’s AFO—and more than 300 Czech and foreign guests, scientists and professionals from the audiovisual industry.

“I am sure that all the activities of our university regarding the festival are paying off. Who would have dared to say that an event consisting of one small classroom, one projector and a small audience would become so huge in fifty years?” exclaimed Dostálek.

His team is also trying to think about its main themes and potential guests on a long-term basis. “We have recently drifted far away, when we caught ourselves talking about the schedule for 2016, although we have not yet officially presented the main theme of this fiftieth anniversary: our planet. The gripping films in the section “Rise and Fall” will provide a close look at the rise and fall of civilizations and animal species. The audience will have a chance to see life in ancient Egypt, walk with dinosaurs, admire Viking culture or glimpse the secrets of life,” said AFO Programme Director Jakub Ráliš.

Seeing over knowing

The fiftieth birthday is being sophisticatedly reflected in its visual presentation: “A series of posters is going to illustrate technological achievements of the past fifty years in two versions—the first showing how people imagined them fifty years ago, and the second showing how they actually look now,” explained Dostálek.

The management of the festival has a long-term concept of graphic design and its own visual identity—the three-year design plan of the ReDesign studio consists of uniform typography and layout with a new slogan and graphic motif for every year.

“It gives us a great deal of variability when working with our brand. For releases of a steady or conservative character, we use a heading complemented with photographs. In this way, we published a magazine AFO 2014 for guests and partners of the festival. For street campaigns and advertisements, we are, on the other hand, using such slogans and graphic motifs that should attract attention, raising questions or even eyebrows,” said Dostálek. According to the Director, the upcoming jubilee will be intentionally presented as a relaxed comparison of imaginative vision and reality.

The AFO Platform

Today, Academia Film Olomouc is not just a festival. For several years, it has also been serving as an educational platform for students of the Faculty of Arts. Students receive credits for their participation in the organisation of the festival, for helping with dramaturgy or publishing; the best ones even receive stipends. Many undergraduates are also choosing the genre of popular science films as the topic of their Master’s theses.

The Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies has been running a project for the past two years called AFO:

Practical Networking of Audiovisual Popularisation of Science, which enables students to join Czech and foreign production companies and institutions engaged in the popularisation of science.

“The experience gained will help them not only in their own further research, but will also contribute crucially to the further development of the festival—due to their new knowledge and valuable contacts. We have had the opportunity, thanks to this unique project, to visit world famous festivals, congresses and conferences focused on science communication, where we had the chance to personally meet top experts in the field of science and the film industry. Consequently, it was not so hard for us to persuade them to come to AFO,” noted Ráliš.

AFO Distribution

In November, the AFO team attended for the fourth time the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers—the most important event of its kind, this year in Hong Kong. Here top experts in their respective fields meet with directors of television and production companies such as the BBC, PBS, ABC, Discovery, and Atlantic.

“This year, apart from having the opportunity to watch the latest developments in scientific documentary films and to establish personal contacts with producers, we are presenting ourselves for the first time also as producers and distributors. It is actually in the film distribution field where we have recently achieved several significant accomplishments,” noted Dostálek.

Via AFO, Palacký University has started to choose and distribute films for Czech scientific centres. “Personally, I think this is an important milestone in both AFO and UP activities, one which has the potential to make popular science films to become the most attended documentaries in Czech cinemas within the next two years,” expressed Dostálek.

The first contract was the distribution of five top-quality documentaries to the educational centre Svět techniky in Ostrava, where the films will be shown in the biggest Czech non-commercial 3D cinema.

“Our job was to use our expertise and choose the films, obtain licenses and arrange the dubbing. We won this contract in a competition,” added Ráliš.

According to Ráliš, audiences should be looking forward to the 3D documentaries Flying Monsters with David Attenborough, where the famous naturalist reveals the secret of life of lesser-known prehistoric lizards; an adventurous journey with prehistoric Titans of the Ice Age, or The Last Reef—a documentary describing coral reefs as organic undersea cities visible from outer space.

“We are also going to show Vlčie hory (The Wolf Mountains), a Slovak documentary depicting rare encounters with shy animals in an untouched ecosystem in such a suggestive way that it won the Audience Award at this year’s AFO. And we are not going to miss out on the Czech film Whose is My Child? dealing with the issue of the impact of genetic testing on parenthood—a television documentary that has also won several awards,” said Dostálek.

Made in AFO

And there is more to AFO than buying and selling foreign films. Thanks to contacts made in the past few years, the organisers have become directly involved in the production of a three-part Australian TV series called Uranium: Twisting the Dragon’s Tail.

“On this project, we are working together with the renowned Genepool Productions company, led by producer and Emmy Award-winner Sonya Pemberton. Thus in September, our production team spent five shooting days in a spa and in mining areas in Jáchymov, where the opening scenes and other sequences for all three parts of this miniseries were shot,” confirmed Dostálek.

The AFO team took care of everything: from setting up the shooting locations, production on site, to staff for the filming, and all translation services. Viewers will be guided through all three episodes by Derek Muller—one of the main guests of this year’s AFO, a presenter and video blogger with millions of followers.

The first hour-long episode should appear on TV during 2015.

The AFO brand also brings together experts from scientific centres and the general public in an informal environment called Science Café shows.

All the activities of Academia Film Olo­mouc are undoubtedly contributing not only to the improvement of communicating science to the public, but also help make Palacký University more visible and confirm its status as a progressive Czech university.

 

 

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