Marina Sirtis, best known for her role as Star Trek’s Deanna Troi has joined the judging panel of the first ever MovieCon.

The inaugural MovieCon is produced by Epsom’s Satisfied Eye International Film Festival (SEIFF)and was originally scheduled to take place with a live event in Epsom, Surrey over the Father's Day Weekend. In response to the current pandemic and with scores of comiccons cancelled globally, the event has now been taken online with a cosplay competition launched this week and running throughout June; culminating with an online prize-giving masquerade on 11 July 2020.

Chris Hastings, Artistic Director of SEIFF and the brains behind MovieCon, explained: “Everyone needs a fillip more than ever during these challenging times so we’re really excited to have Marina on board. Cosplay is an integral part of our festival, the subject of our first in-house documentary and by going online we’re bringing a little joy to the countless cosplayers around the world who spend months preparing for these events.”

MovieCon is completely free and entries are now open for cosplayers of any age who want to take part in the masquerade and compete for prizes including hand-crafted combat light-sabres.

Marina Sirtis will congratulate the winners at the closing event.

The closing date for entries is 27 June 2020 with full details at www.satisfiedeye.com/moviecon2020

NOTES FOR EDITORS

1 Star Trek: The Next Generation originally ran for 7 seasons (1987 to 1994) with the cast reprising their roles in four feature films: Star Trek: Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). Marina Sirtis reprised her role in the recent Amazon Prime series Star Trek: Picard (2020)

2 Cosplay is the hobby of dressing up as a favourite movie, TV, comic or game character. With comiccon events globally attracting hundreds of thousands of attendees including Hollywood superstars, cosplay is a multi-billion dollar industry.

3 The Masquerade is one of the most popular features of any comiccon event, where cosplayers of all abilities get to compete for the best costume prizes.