Sep 26, 2024
View Mallorca spoke to Sandra Lipski, Founder and Director of Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival
- By
Blaire Dessent
View Mallorca spoke to Sandra Lipski, Founder and Director of Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival
Sep 26, 2024
by
Blaire Dessent
View Mallorca spoke to Sandra Lipski, Founder and Director of Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival
Sep 26, 2024
by
Blaire Dessent
View Mallorca spoke to Sandra Lipski, Founder and Director of Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival
Sep 26, 2024
- By
Blaire Dessent
View Mallorca spoke to Sandra Lipski, Founder and Director of Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival
Sep 26, 2024
- By
Blaire Dessent
View Mallorca spoke to Sandra Lipski, Founder and Director of Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival
Sep 26, 2024
- By
Blaire Dessent
Sandra Lipski
T

he 13th edition of Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival (EMIFF) officially gets underway on October 30th and will run through November 5th, 2024. Founded in 2012 by actress and producer, Sandra Lipski, the Evolution Mallorca has gained international recognition over the last decade, bringing key actors, directors, writers, cinematographers and other industry professionals to the island for the week-long event. Most importantly, the festival has created a unique opportunity for independent films, including documentaries, shorts, experimental films and films made on the Balearic Islands to be presented to the Mallorcan public. 

Born in Berlin, Lipski was raised in Mallorca between the ages of 9-18, moving to New York for film school and then onto Los Angeles for 20-years, where she worked in the film industry with her husband, who is a cinematographer. She moved back to the island with her family this year, in part because of the growing success of the festival. 

Lipski’s motivation to start a film festival on the island came about when she completed her film thesis project in 2011, in Los Angeles, and sent it off to festivals around the world. She wanted an opportunity for her family, who were still living in Mallorca, to see the film, but there was not any festival where she could submit it. After a lot of research, Lipski, along with a small team of friends, launched the first edition of EMIFF in 2012. It was a 3-day event with 20 films. 13 years later, EMIFF is a week-long event with 140 films screening across the island. Within those 140-films are feature and short films, Spanish short films, documentaries, children’s films, experimental and animation, new talent films and music videos. The objective of the festival is to be international, screening films made around the globe along with a spotlight on the Balearic Islands. Submissions are made through the platform Film Freeway beginning January 1st of the year through mid-August. This year they received 1200 submissions, all of which were reviewed by a team of six programmers.

Isabel Coixet with her Evolution Vision award, 2023
Daniel Bruhl with his Icon award in 2023
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reating special awards such as the Evolution Honorary award, the Icon award and the Visionary award, helped grow the reputation of the festival. Celebrities such as Mads Mikkelsen, who has a home on the island and spends a lot of time here, helped further validation, and this year Annette Benning will attend the event as the recipient of the Icon award, an exciting addition to the festival. 

For ten years, EMIFF has included a ‘Made in the Balearics’ section of the festival, which this year will include nearly 30 films. This offers an important opportunity to highlight films made and produced on the islands and establish a platform for growing and supporting film professionals, especially up and coming talent. With Mallorca becoming increasingly popular as a place to shoot film and TV, there is a lot of potential to grow the industry on the island, adding value to the local economy as well.  

As Lipski notes, “We want to support new talent and filmmakers from island and abroad. At the end of the day, the whole idea of the festival is to create a community that connects the outside or international film community with the Balearic Island community”. In addition to the film screenings EMIFF puts a spotlight onto cinematography, offering a Cinematography Icon award. Previous recipients include Erik Messerschmidt and Ed Lachman. There is a screenplay competition in which 30 screenplays are selected and invited to have pitch sessions with writers to refine their scripts. Throughout the event, there are talks and panels on a variety of industry themes. This year also marks a new programme collaboration with the Mallorcan Preservation Foundation called ‘Cine Consciente’ or Conscious Cinema. Over the course of 2-months, four films focused on the theme of climate change and environment will be shown at the Estudi General Lul.lia, in Palma. The first film, “Sonic Sea”, screened on September 19th. The second film is showing on October 10th

The Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival is supported by the Fundacion Mallorca Turismo. The full programme will be announced and tickets will go on sale in mid-October.  Stay tuned for more details. 

@evolutionmallorcafilmfestival

Evolution Film Festival

“We want to support new talent and filmmakers from island and abroad. At the end of the day, the whole idea of the festival is to create a community that connects the outside or international film community with the Balearic Island community”.
Mads Mikkelsen and Susanne Bier