FOTOS LAMPRINOS HONORARY CEREMONY
The 11th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival honored Fotos Lamprinos, one of the most important film makers and keepers of Greece’s historical memory at a ceremony on Thursday, March 19, 2009 at the Olympion Cinema.
Opening the ceremony, the artistic director of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival Dimitri Eipides noted: “ It is a Festival tradition to honor a distinguished director every year, a director whose work has contributed to the growth of the genre and its development internationally”. He added: “ Fotos Lamprinos is one of the greatest Greek directors, with a large body of work behind him, who continues to be an inspiration to newer generations”.
Fotos Lamprinos said that he was moved by the large number of people who came to his screenings: “I thought that I would be the only one there, perhaps one other person. When I saw a director friend of mine outside the theater I joked ‘come in so there can be two of us’. When I went in and saw that the room was full I was very moved”.
Director Theo Angelopoulos handed out the honorary plaque. Mr. Angelopoulos spoke about his relationship with Fotos Lamprinos: “I met Fotos in 1971 in Rome, at a midnight screening. There was a dictatorship in Greece then, and all the exiled Greeks in the theater had come not so much to see the film as to see Greece. They were all crying. After the film Fotos and I went to a square, and spoke about the homeland till morning”.
At the end of the ceremony, the audience had the opportunity to see Fotos Lamprinos’ latest film, Captain Kemal, A Comrade. The director said: “Documentaries are fiction using other means. There is no difference between the two as far as I’m concerned. In Captain Kemal, a 92 year old man tells his story to the lens, with humor and emotion”.
