DATELINE: 4th January 2001
ANTIBES GATHERING
The 27th Antibes Underwater Festival proved a big draw for diving photographers, film-makers and media folk from around the world. As usual the French event, held late last year, boasted a uniquely convivial atmosphere and a bewildering range of award categories - including accolades for underwater books, music, CD-Roms, websites and magazine reporting, as well as for films, slides, prints and AVs, writes Nigel Eaton.
Britain's diving film-makers again distinguished themselves. In the Small Format category, two of the top three winning entries were British. John Boyle and Fionn Crow Howieson took Gold with their film Critters and Night Critters, ahead of Italy's Fabrizio Lazzari and Susanna Casadei (Silver) with Hommage to Annabella. Simon Christopher took Bronze with That's Life.
And in the Large Format category, Michael Wong's spectacular and authoritative 52-minute Sipadan wildlife study Secrets of the Turtle Mountain took Silver behind The Orcas of Crozet by France's Bertrand and Frederic Loyer.
Meanwhile, the top honours in the coveted Slide category (judged on the best portfolio of 10 slides) went to France's Laurent Ballesta (Gold), beating Germany's Reinhart Dirscherl and Italy's Andrea Pivari (joint Silver), and Italy's Settimio Cipriani (Bronze).
Among this year's guest speakers was British underwater cameraman Mike Valentine, whose Shell TV commercial won a prize in the Underwater Advertising category. Valentine is well known at this event, and to a packed audience he spoke for nearly two hours about the small but important part that he has played in the making of blockbuster movies including The Beach and The World is Not Enough.
A last-minute addition to the Antibes programme was Mike Portelly, and the 10-minute film brought to the festival by this great innovator of the underwater film world contained a beautiful and challenging mix of images.
Its subject was the damage being inflicted to the global environment by human activity, and Portelly spoke passionately about the threats and his view of the way forward.
"Huge progress could be made if big companies were encouraged to contribute to conservation work as part of their marketing strategy," he said. "This would provide vital funding for projects aimed at cutting pollution, maintaining biodiversity and so on, and would be an excellent way for the companies to enhance their image with the public. Everybody wins."