The animated short film P, by Greek filmmaker Stelios Koupetoris, received a fantastic reception at the IN THE PALACE International Film Festival, Bulgaria.

This is the umpteenth Hollywood Oscar qualifying event for this Greek-Israeli production, a double winner at Tirana International Film Festival, Albania.

Stelios Koupetoris was born in Piraeus, Greece and he is a director, writer and sound designer. In 2019 he completed his first short film W and has been in the official selection of more than 80 film festivals, winning 21 awards and 12 nominations. W has also been distributed to German speaking schools for educational purposes through Interfilm International Film Festival and KFW organization. As a sound editor and sound designer he has worked on more than 90 film and TV productions, including the BAFTA winning Under the Shadow, McQueen, Cold Feet and Mum and the awarded with Primetime Emmy, Golden Globes and 5 BAFTAs (including for best sound) Killing Eve. He has two MPSE Golden Reel nominations and has been awarded for best sound at Drama Film Festival and Belgaum International Film Festival. His film music has been nominated 3 times at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards and has also been nominated at the International Sound and Music Film Festival of Croatia and at the Marseille international Film Festival-Music and Cinema, in which he was a participating member in the European Market, 2020.

P stands for propaganda. P is a film against racism, social exclusion and discrimination and the role of the entertainment industry in establishing and communicating racist stereotypes throughout societies on behalf of every current political agenda. The main characters of the film have not been chosen randomly. The cat and mouse natural rivalry and their hunter-pray relationship symbolize the dualist ethic of good and evil, that influenced a large proportion of the western, industrialized propagandistic fiction stories. The sharp contrasts between domestic-parasitic, clean-dirty, legal-illegal that the cat and mouse struggle reflects in human consciousness, were used in films as semiotic elements of a polarized, over-simplified principle suggesting that everything in this world is divided into good and evil. The cat-mouse duo, along with all of their associative contradictory properties, symbolizes the authoritarian role played by those who are socially and institutionally imposed as cats, to those who are socially regarded by cats as mice. Under this controversial dualism, the pop film industry indoctrinated an easy solution for every complex issue: a hero that was glorified and a villain that was incriminated. For the continental expansion of post-colonial north America there was always a film of a good white cowboy chasing a bad native American. For the metropolitan criminality there was always and action-packed movie of a good-white policeman chasing a bad Afro-American gangster. For the international imperialism, there was always a an excessively violent film of a good veteran fighting an evil Vietcong, Soviet, Arab or any other “enemy” enlisted in each country’s foreign policy catalogue. By these standards, a considerable number of popular films became part of a cognitive strategy that have influenced contemporary culture and social consciences, by magnifying some of the most serious problems of modern societies. Racism, injustice, social discrimination and the oversimplification of social issues are problems that must be eliminated. This is the most important reason why I want to make this film. There is no place for propaganda in any cinema, in any art. P is the second independent part of a short film trilogy commenting on major global issues. The first part of the trilogy is the short antiwar drama W. The second is P and the last one, E, which is in pre-production focuses on the environmental crisis.

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