We are pleased to invite you to the screening of the documentary "Building Community of Commons in Greece. A Documentary about The Sarantaporo.gr Community Network", which will take place on Friday, May 6, 2016 at 6 pm in the Cultural Center of Sarantaporo village.
The documentary has been shot over the last 3 years in the Greater Sarantaporo area by Personal Cinema with the support of Sarantaporo.gr and crowd funding through a crowdfunding campaign on the Goteo platform involving 88 people from Greece and abroad.
About the documentary:
"Sarantaporo is a mountain village in northern Greece, in the municipality of Elassona. It is a region with a farm economy that was not left unaffected by the crisis. Even before that, however, state responsibility for the area was lacking. Youth were fleeting to major urban centers or abroad, there was no internet access and locals were experiencing isolation but also exclusion from basic services such as healthcare. In 2010, a group of people developed the infrastructure of a community wireless network with the aim both connecting the villages of the area with each other and with the rest of the world. However, as the project matures over time, the community of the Sarantaporo.gr network is further targeting. They want to be the catalyst for locals to reorganize cooperatives based on the community network, revitalize the local economy by making it sustainable, more extroverted and independent of state or corporate control. They hope to bridge state-of-the-art technologies (such as that of a wireless network) with the real, everyday challenges of a provincial community whose economy is based on the primary sector.
What are these challenges? How is a community born and how are pre-existing social structures affected during this process? What are the stories of people involved in this process one way or another? What can a project in a small provincial population, in a remote area of ??crisis-hit Greece, have to do with an ICT (Information & Communication Technology) project at the University of Catalonia and in the wider context of trying to create a new one common ground for the people of Europe? These are some of the questions the documentary goes through."
The event will start with presentation of the Masters thesis by George Klissiaris on "Exploiting Digital Technologies as a Growth Factor in Rural Areas - The Case of Sarantaporo.gr NPO". An open discussion with the public will follow after the screening.
Entrance is free.
