We were given time to find our voices

Earlier this year, I saw an advertisement on social media for the Invisible Myths film workshop on the island of Aegina. Having been to the Aegean Islands a year before, I had already been creatively inspired by the landscape, people and wildlife of Greece, and saw this advert as something of a fateful sign from the heavens to return. I had been thinking about making a film for a while, and I imagined with excitement the process of learning and working with other creative people while enjoying the shores and sun of the islands once again. Without thinking too much or doing any research, I applied. It was a fantastic decision. 

 

The workshop was a truly collaborative and social experience; I was working, living and eating with five others from different countries, and we were each applying our own perspectives and skills to the process. Sometimes such situations can be problematic. The combination of a group of strangers living closely together and new unknown surroundings could have easily led to conflict. It was with great pleasure that I found that was not to be the case here. The five others that I spent the week with were talented, humble and kind, and I will look back upon the time we spent together fondly. 

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Together, we were following a creative program set down by Mariangela and Oliwia, two established filmmakers and artists who had developed a program to activate our minds and ideas as the week progressed. With their guidance, we were drawn into an immersive understanding of myth, cinema and the landscape that we explored together, workshopping in many different forms over the first few days. We were given time to find our voices in relation to these things, and we let the creative process breathe slowly as we went along. The two of them were inspiring in their insistence on subtlety, bravery and ambivalence in art, while also maintaining a spiritual and mythic connection to the landscape.

 

We also maintained a social relationship with our mentors, eating meals and spending most of our days together. Such an atmosphere bred some personally fulfilling and innovative concepts within my mind, and ultimately led to new developments within my creative voice that I had not considered before. As we progressed, we began to move into the development of short films in two separate groups, an area that I have had no prior experience of. Throughout, it was ensured that I would gain all the knowledge required, and by the end of the process, in which a short film was realised, I had gained a tremendous amount of confidence in film making within a short space of time, and had developed a first work to be proud of. 

 

Overall, the entire process was exhilarating, and the ideas and memories that emerged throughout have had a lasting impact after I have returned home. 

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