Editor

The EDN Award 2011 is presented to Dimitri Eipides, Director of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. He receives the award for his enthusiastic and energetic work with establishing and continuously developing the documentary film festival in Thessaloniki. The award is presented on Friday March 18 at 19:30 at an award reception at the international documentary pitching session Docs in Thessaloniki.

Dimitri Eipides & Hanne Skjødt

Upon presenting the EDN Award Hanne Skjødt, Director of EDN says:

Dimitri Eipides developed his vision of creating a documentary festival in Greece 13 years ago and by 1999 he was heading the first Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. His enthusiastic commitment to establishing a space for the independent creative documentary in Greece resulted in the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival becoming one of the leading and highly respected European festivals. Dimitri Eipides has an extraordinary ability to program a strong contemporary international selection of documentary films. This, combined with his tireless efforts of constantly developing the festival and the market, has established Thessaloniki Documentary Festival as one of the most important documentary events in Europe with an audience of 45.000 and a strong international industry section. When times change from difficult to worse some people bend, whereas others, like Dimitri Eipides, decide to fight even harder by taking on more responsibilities and bigger challenges. To honour this outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture we are very pleased to present the EDN Award 2011 to Dimitri Eipides.

About The EDN Award

The EDN Award is presented annually during Docs in Thessaloniki to an institution, group or private person for outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture. Previously the award has been presented to Finnish Broadcaster YLE, The Dutch Jan Vrijman Fund, Serbian Magnificent7, Institute of Documentary Film in Prague, Nenad Puhovski for initiating ZagrebDox. Last year the award was exceptionally presented to a non-European receiver as it went to IRDFA - Iranian Documentary Filmmakers Association.

EDN - European Documentary Network is a member-based organisation for professionals working with documentary film and television. The organization has over 1100 members from more than 60 countries. More about EDN - http://www.edn.dk/