The 65th Thessaloniki International Film Festival began in unusually dry, warm autumn weather. The festival is a big event in the city’s cultural calendar, and its central district was abuzz with visitors and locals filling the seven, mostly sold-out, screening venues. Over 11 days, the festival screened 252 full-length and 24 short films, as well as another 67 available online. This report surveys the offerings of the Greek Film Festival section of 22 features. Unfortunately, time did not permit the viewing of the 24 award-winning Greek shorts from the September 2024 Drama International Short Film Festival which form part of the national section. 

The opening night was a celebratory affair, humorously brought down to earth by two wheelchair-bound young men who compèred the evening, a gesture by the festival to highlight visibility and access for people with disabilities. The usual speeches followed from festival executives and politicians. The Festival General Director, Elise Jalladeau, stressed the humanising influence of cinema at a time when two wars were occurring within close distance, “A test to our very civilisation, deeply offensive to the principles of humanity.” The issue of war surfaced again during the festival when BDS Greece and other artist organisations published a letter to the festival asking them to withdraw the screening of Israel’s Oscar-nominee Come Closer (Tom Nesher), as well as cutting ties with CoPro Israel, the government-supported marketing body, as a stand against genocide in Palestine. The screening went ahead, but in the case of CoPro, the festival denied any dealings with it, despite evidence from BDS that the festival had made a payment to CoPro and was listed as a partner/sponsor. Whatever the exact relationship, the controversy brings to the fore the fundamental question of the relationship between art and reality, the very question that many films in the festival raise in infinitely varied and fascinating ways. 

Maria

Maria The Unknown Callas

The opening-night film, Maria, by Chilean director Pablo Lorraín, was a natural choice, given its international acclaim and the story’s connection to Greece. A biopic that plunges us into the final dark days of Maria Callas’s life when the dissonance between her private and public personas reaches a tragic end, it is a psychological drama based on a sophisticated script and with an outstanding performance by Angelina Jolie. As a companion piece, the festival also screened the first two episodes of a ten-part television series I Maria pou egine Kallas (Maria: The Unknown Callas, 2024) produced by the Greek national broadcaster ERT. Directed by well-known filmmaker Olga Malea, the series covers Callas’s formative years in Greece from 1937 to 1945. Judging from the screened episodes, the series has high production values and provides a culturally specific take on Callas’s Athens years.

Hunt

This year’s Greek films were of a consistently high standard, reflecting the increasingly professionalised mode of production in the Greek film industry in recent decades. From script to cinematography, design, acting, scores and direction, these are accomplished films. This is not to say that some are not more successful than others, or that they all fully realise their artistic ambitions. For example, while Christos Pitharas’s Kynigi (Hunt) creates a dark and bleak picture of a loner’s life, the protagonist’s final violent act appears arbitrary and contrary to his character. The protagonist (played by a non-professional, Yannis Belis) has a powerful screen presence. Maldives (Daniel Bolda) is another film about a loner, deeply attached to his dog, whose death in an isolated mountainous area precipitates a psychological encounter with the spirits of the forest. This layered meditation on death and nature is enhanced by the film’s design and soundtrack. The narrative journey, not always easy to follow, contains, however, moments of transcendence which linger as disturbing images. A salient feature of this year’s films was the large number of stories about the loss of a loved one and the difficulty of moving on. 

The standout features for me were Kreas (Meat, Dimitris Nakos), Arcadia (Yorgos Zois) and Wishbone (Penny Panayotopoulou), all of which received significant awards. 

Meat

Nakos, whose first feature follows a string of award-winning shorts as writer and director, delivered a tour de force with his story of Takis (Akilas Karazisis) and his family who run an illegal abattoir in a mountain village. The film starts with a heated exchange at the sheepfold between Takis and a villager, who, recently released from prison, accuses the butcher of usurping his land to graze his animals. Threats of violence set the tension on high and from there it keeps rising to the last shot. Far from being simply a thriller, the film explores moral dilemmas within a family in a rural society whose underbelly hides corruption and personal secrets. Takis’s son Pavlos (Pavlos Iordanopoulos), an unhappy and impulsive young man, resents his domineering father who, as a poor shepherd, pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become a successful man, now about to open a new butcher shop. Christos (Kostas Nikouli) is a young Albanian man who has grown up working for Takis, whom he sees as a father figure. The drama tightens when Pavlos kills the ex-prisoner in a confrontation and talks Christos into helping him bury the body. Rumours circulate, and when Pavlos’s parents learn the truth, they offer Christos substantial payments and the butcher shop if he takes the rap for their son. To financially help his mother in Albania, Christos decides to accept the offer, but the story takes a twist when the butcher’s son, in an erratic moment, believes that Christos is out to steal his inheritance. A fight ensues and Pavlos attacks Christos with a butcher’s knife, only to be lethally stabbed himself. Now Christos is involved in a tragic but accidental killing while being charged for a murder he never committed. At the local police station where Takis and his wife continue their false testimony, a shaken Christos emerges from another room and the screen goes to black. We will never know what follows, but in that moment, the chain of individual acts, the devil’s bargain over the murder, and the societal inequality that has driven it, come crashing down. The audience applause was sustained and enthusiastic.

Arcadia

Arcadia director, Yorgos Zois, with numerous credits and awards as a writer, actor and director, has brought together a highly talented cast, including Vangelis Mourikis and Angeliki Papoulia, to create an enigmatic and mesmerising story about the loss of loved ones and the difficulty of moving on. The story revolves around a fatal car accident involving a couple engaged in an extramarital affair. On the narrative surface, a couple, Yannis (Mourikis) and Katerina (Papoulia), obviously related to the dead woman, rush to the holiday area to identify the body and understand the circumstances of her death. Another couple, Petros (Nikolas Papagiannis) and his wife (Elena Topalidou), related to the dead man, also turns up. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that we are witnessing a drama in which the two dead lovers, Katerina and Petros, accompany their spouses, as though still alive. The story has a psychological dimension that coexists with the real events we are witnessing, the living coexisting with the dead. The living won’t let go of the dead, while the dead – their memories fading – long for release. At night, in a nearby bar called ‘Arcadia’, lost souls try to regain their memories through uninhibited sexual liaisons. The film’s symbolism includes the shoes of the protagonists—high heels that keep Katerina stuck to the ground and expensive shoes that Yannis never chose for himself—straitjackets of social habit. Throughout, we hear songs that speak of missing presences and the dead who long to be released. In the final sequence, Yannis sees off the hearse carrying his wife’s body. Leaving the town with the ghost of his dead wife, he stops at a shoe store where he selects a pair of casual running shoes. His wife disappears from his side, leaving behind her high heels. Yannis is ready to move on. 

Wishbone

Wishbone is Penny Panayotopoulou’s third feature, dealing again with the loss of a father by a young child, as in her Dyskoloi apohairetismoi: O babas mou (Hard Goodbyes: My Father, 2002). But here, through a nuanced script and a fine cast, she presents a wider social context, tying together themes of loss, poverty, a failing health system, class difference and the struggle of a family to hold things together. Kostas (Giannis Karampampas) is a young man with dreams. He wants to buy a motorbike and take a summer holiday with his student girlfriend. He lives with his frail mother and works as a security guard in a rundown hospital where he sees patients dying through lack of resources. Kostas’s brother cares for his young daughter Niki, whose mother is struggling with mental illness. Everything changes when Kostas’s brother suddenly dies from an aneurysm, the local hospital unable to treat emergencies. Kostas takes on the responsibility of raising his niece and saving the family home from a bank foreclosure. A nurse at the hospital, connected to a network of professional perjurers, suggests Kostas sue the doctor who attended to his brother. Kostas initially refuses, but, facing the loss of home, agrees to testify in another case where a patient died. He is given €6,000 in advance, which helps with the debt and buys him a new motorbike. His dream, however, of youthful happiness and love is dashed when his middle-class girlfriend ends their relationship. Kostas changes his mind about testifying. One night, he hears a disturbance outside his house and finds his bike being smashed in the street by the nurse and a thug with an iron bar. He is beaten and left to die in the street. The camera slowly tracks backwards into the house and down a long hallway, with Kostas’s bloodied body visible in the distance. The family’s core is now reduced to the grandmother and Niki. Kostas’s wish for youthful happiness and family security has slipped away. 

The River

Haris Raftogiannis’s To potami (The River), about the life of an Indigenous community disrupted by a new superhighway (‘the river’), is a mixed-genre film that uses stock footage, split screen and retro elements to create an exaggerated, composite world. Makis (Makis Papadimitriou), the risk-averse highway engineer, falls in love with Maria (Stefania Sotiropoulou), who is loyal to her marginalised people, but they are on opposite sides of ‘the river’. Makis naively believes in modern progress while Maria is torn between resistance and escape into modern consumerism. An allegorical love story that tackles big questions with originality and a light touch.

Kyuka: Before Summer’s End

Kostis Charamountanis’s Kiouka prin to telos tou kalokeriou (Kyuka: Before Summer’s End) is an inventive comedy-drama about a summer holiday that two adolescent twins share with their single father on his yacht. The idyllic holiday is comically undercut by the whinging of the teenagers and the father’s need to prove his prowess at fishing. A seemingly innocent meeting with a teenage girl and her younger sister leads to a meeting with the twins’ estranged mother. The story climaxes in an encounter between the mother’s second husband and their father, a comic and sad display of competitive masculinity that alienates the twins. The summer ends with the prospect of a reconciliation between the twins and their mother. The sea and its underwater world provide a symbolic counterfoil to a drama of social dysfunction. 

Riviera

Riviera (Orfeas Peretzis) is a coming-of-age film about Alkistis (Eva Samioti) who, in her final high school year, finds it hard to come to terms with her father’s death and her mother’s decision to sell their seaside boarding-house where Alkistis has grown up. Another film about moving on in life, it incorporates contemporary themes, such as the looming ecological imbalance and the influx of foreign capital into Greece’s real estate market. Although some elements in the film feel a little forced, it has a fresh contemporary feel to it.

Giannis in the Cities 

Giannis in the Cities (Eleni Alexandraki) is the dramatised account of the life of Giannis, who at the age of six was put into the care of Greece’s Queen Frederica’s Child Cities where the children of left-wing resistance and civil war fighters were indoctrinated to hate and renounce their parents. This modest but moving film is an attempt to re-imagine an historical experience largely hidden from public memory. Shot in black and white in old, abandoned buildings, it charts Giannis’s life from childhood to adulthood, from the civil war (1946-1949) to the end of the dictatorship (1967-1974). The child actors are convincing in a story about deep trauma and stolen childhoods.

The Philosopher – I have something to say

Stratos Tzitzis’s Eho kati na po (The Philosopher (I Have Something to Say)) is a playful comedy set in contemporary Athens about an unsuccessful director, Stavros (Antinoos Albanis), who writes a book of philosophy for a vanity publisher out to make money from a naive dreamer. In fact, the character is an actor in a film directed by the real director about someone acting as his alter-ago. The film cuts between the two with comic effect. The dialogue is full of colourful slang and comical self-references to the process of filmmaking. Comedies like this are in short supply at festivals, and this is a welcome change.1 

Greece’s film industry increasingly operates in a globalised environment, and the tensions this creates can be seen in this year’s productions. Putting aside the international careers of directors such as Yorgos Lanthimos (Kinds of Kindness), Athina Rachel Tsangari (Harvest) and Alexandros Avranas (Quiet Life), whose recent films primarily address international audiences, there is a subtle internal tension within contemporary Greek cinema about who its primary audience is. Films like Meat and Wishbone clearly address a domestic audience, and they connected viscerally with the Greek festival audience. At the other end of the spectrum, Alexandros Tsilifonis’s Café 404, an entertaining dark comedy shot entirely in English only an hour’s drive from Athens, could easily screen as a contemporary U.S.A. story. It may well find an audience in Greece, but more as American -style entertainment. In between, there are films in various genres that may or may not connect with diverse audiences. The tension mentioned above may be partly due to a bifurcated pathway for films in search of audiences—limited domestic distribution and overseas screenings, the latter mainly through festivals. The breakthrough into international distribution is a difficult but much sought-after goal.

The perennial problem however, and not just for Greek filmmakers, is having the initial chance to achieve cinema screenings in the domestic market. There are recent examples of runaway box office successes (Eftihia, Angelos Frantzis, 2019 and Murderess, Eva Nathena, 2023),2 but these are exceptional cases, while many deserving films fail to be picked up by local distributors to kickstart their wider exposure. Greek filmmakers are tapping into European sources of funding (Eurimages) and the Thessaloniki Festival’s networking program Agora, but competition is strong. European co-productions are now a common strategy to receive more funding and maximise reach.

It is a commonplace observation here that Greeks generally do not watch contemporary Greek films, at least in cinemas. They do, however, consume a lot of Greek television drama and comedies. With the move to streaming (Cinobo3) and on-demand TV (ERTFLIX), the viewing landscape is changing. It remains to be seen how these changes will help Greek filmmakers in the long term find audiences in an increasingly globalised cinematic world. Despite the arduous process of creating films, Greek filmmakers remain deeply committed to realising and offering their cinematic stories to the world. 

The writer thanks Mary Kolonia (producer, writer, director) and Dimitris Kalantidis (President of the Federation of Cinematic Clubs of Greece) for sharing their valuable insights.

Thessaloniki International Film Festival
31 October—10 November 2024
https://www.filmfestival.gr/en/

Endnotes

  1. A similar style comedy Too Much Info Clouding Over My Head (Vassilis Christofilakis, 2017) has surprisingly received little attention. Tzitzis’s film signals a continuation of this new comedic vein in Greek cinema. See: Petro Alexiou, Finding the National Within the International: TIFF Revives a National Film Festival’, Senses of Cinema, Issue 85, December 2017.
  2. Eftihia sold 667,217 cinema tickets (Filmy, https://www.filmy.gr/movies-database/eftyhia/ ) while the Murderess sold 268.098 tickets (Cinemagazine, https://www.cinemagazine.gr/themata/arthro/greek_boxoffice_14_12_23_17_12_23-131059514/ ).
  3. Cinobo (‘cinema no borders’), a Greek streaming platform, was launched in March 2020. In 2023, there were two Greek movies in Cinobo’s first 10 ‘most watched’ list: Yorgos Gousis’s Magnetic Fields (2021) and Despina Mavridou’s short Tsoulakia (Hussies, 2022).