The “Apollo-Aphrodite” International Film Festival
The “Apollo-Aphrodite” International Film Festival for people with physical disabilities (visual, hearing, and speech impairments) will take place for the first time ever in St Petersburg (Russia) and various other countries. The film festival is organised by the ‘Apollo’ Arts Council and the ‘International Charitable Foundation for Humanitarian Cooperation’.
The film festival is open to people with physical disabilities (visual, hearing, speech), including cultural figures, and students at various levels of education with specific physical limitations, as well as people without physical disabilities, including cultural figures.
The aim of the Film Festival is to foster a genuine appreciation of the art of cinema (the visual and auditory experience) through the boundless spiritual potential inherent in the senses of sight, hearing, speech and touch of all people, including those with physical disabilities. A crucial role in this regard is played by such spiritually rich human emotions as love and a person’s tactile perception of reality, which is, by its very nature, spiritually significant and thus manifests itself physically (visually) in a recipient with physical disabilities.
In a certain sense, the truly innovative film ‘True Love’ (written and directed by Santi P. Jayasekara) can serve as a model for the Film Festival. The film’s protagonists: a pianist and poet with visual impairments, and an artist with hearing and speech impairments—as the strongest spiritual and volitional strain, the protagonists’ true love for a sighted girl —a sign language interpreter for the deaf and mute—makes the pianist-poet inwardly, and to a significant extent physically, sighted, as he deeply perceives spiritually expressive painting, whilst enabling the artist to hear spiritually uplifting music inwardly and even physically, and to understand spiritually oriented spoken language.
Thus, the fundamental prospects for a particular kind of cinematic art have already been practically outlined.
The opening of the film festival in St Petersburg is scheduled for 28 November 2016 (7.00 pm) at 45 Bolshaya Morskaya Street.
The film festival’s organising committee
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