Stergios Karatsividis a.k.a. ESCA, is a 24 years old film director and visual artist from Greece. Founder of the international independent cinema label Iris Umbra Pictures. He has created different type of films, and worked in many different kinds of art media in collaboration with many artists from different fields. Experienced and educated in the field of contemporary fine arts and independent cinema.

Bio:
Since 2018, Stergios Karatsividis have been working as a photographer at the Studio Image photography studio in a small town called Alexandria (Greece), taking and editing photos for everyday use. After a while, he took part in larger-scale jobs as he participated in the videography of various events in the wider area and in the city of Thessaloniki, among others, weddings and baptisms, where he got his first contact with videography as a camera operator.
From September 2019 to May 2024, he studied at the Fine Arts Department of the School of Fine and Applied Arts, in Cyprus University of Technology, with specialty in installations, photography and three-dimension media.
Since 2022, he's active in the field of independent cinema, developing experience in almost every field of the creative process. In January of 2024, he attempted to create and establish an international label of independent film productions called Iris Umbra Pictures, with partners in Greece, Cyprus, Spain, the Netherlands, France and other European countries.

Filmography:
- In 2022, he met the Spanish director and screenwriter Mago Esal in Cyprus, where they collaborated on Mago Esal's first independent short film entitled “No Witches Around”. In this project he was completely in charge of the photography enlargement of the film as well as the editing. The film was divided into three sequences, outdoors on the beach road of Limassol. This is the first project of Iris Umbra Pictures and after its release it won awards in two international film festivals.
- In 2023 Esca made his first short film named "Bookshadow", an independent short film, that marks his directorial debut in a psychological fantasy thriller. It was co-produced by Mago Esal who also wrote the script, andm the film distributed by Iris Umbra Pictures and Studio Image. In this project in addition to the field of direction, Esca served several roles including production, direction, photography direction, art direction, music production, editing etc. The film so far has one distinction as a finalist at the monthly Lubea festival in Stockholm, Sweden and won an award as one of the 4 best short films in the 43th Cinema Week Villena in Spain.
- Another project of this year have been added on his filmography, called "To Teras II". The project "To Teras II" is a production of the filmmaker Savvas Christou, founder of the production company "Cult Experiences" based in Cyprus. In this project, four filmmakers and their teams are invited to shoot a mockumentary film middle-feature length in less than 24 hours, in a separatist community that has settled on the Troodos mountain in Cyprus. Each team is invited to create their own version of the first feature film of Christou entitled “To Teras”, a 2019 mockumentary.
- The last short film of Esca was a 10 minutes experimental short film of 2024, with the title "St. Manga", that was the previous name of the director. The story of St. Manga is a mesh that combines the two natures of creation, and also examines the relationship between the creator and the creation, in a journey of the hero (piece of art) where he goes through various stages until his independence from the creator. The duality in the film's universe serves the diversity of the characters, but also the functioning of the world in which they interact with plus and minus, light and shadow. "St. Manga" was his final project of his graduation that exhibited in many places of Greece and Cyprus.

*All the projects will be released in Youtube or/and other platforms soon.

What's Next:
The year 2025 finds Esca directing two feature films and work on the post-production of another one at the same time. Esca's next years' projects promising a lot about the future of the new independent cinema of South and South-East Europe.