Strange and mysterious creatures, monsters that live next to and within us, are featured in the big tribute of the 65th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (October 31st to November 10th, 2024), titled We, the Monster, which continues and enhances last year’s tribute FANT SM S. The tribute is curated by the internationally renowned Carlo Chatrian, former Artistic Director of the Berlin and Locarno Film Festivals, film critic, writer and programmer. The audience will have the opportunity to watch more than 20 masterpieces of world cinema, which explore and run through the complex and fascinating symbolisms and riddles that hide in all kinds of monsters.
Monsters were born almost simultaneously with storytelling, the creation of narrative and the universal and timeless need to give shape and form to our fears, in order to cope with them and face them, and over the centuries they served as a source of inspiration for countless stories of horror, love and acceptance. Gradually, as Western societies acquired structures and regulations, trying to tame the unspoken and the incomprehensible, monsters were banished from the organized frame of society. The era in which gods and demons, mortals and myths, humans and monsters co-existed, was now gone. The monsters returned to their dark womb, to primeval nature: they inhabited the forests and mountains, the depths of caves and the bottom of the sea. And the danger that this unseen force and this forbidden presence began to pose, acquired almost inevitably an irresistible allure.
Monsters were used from the very beginning as a symbol in literature and painting, most of the time in order to express the unknown, the unfamiliar, the gaze of otherness. Cinema soon followed.
“Giving shape and body to fears and desires, the monster touches upon the very quintessence of cinema. When we think of exceptional, unique, unforgettable images, it is not towards the perfection of beauty that we turn. Films are at the same time an open window into the unknown and a deforming but profoundly accurate mirror of our inner nature. Often shown as the “enemy”, monsters have just as often become a lens through which we can grasp the otherness of our societies, the monstrosity that dwells within each one of us and the natural impulse to understand and accept what is different", says Carlo Chatrian.
In the films of the tribute, we find monsters of history and politics that wrote some of the darkest pages in the book of the 20th century, monsters invisible and imaginary that reflect the most inexplicable and extreme behaviors of the human psyche. “The monster appears increasingly as an inverted image of ourselves. As populism, extreme political choices and hostility lead to monstrosities, we are horrified to find that the monster does not dwell only in the imaginary world out there, but also within us, and that with our participation, tolerance or silence we can also become monsters, as composer Manos Hadjidakis wisely foretold [When you get accustomed to the monster, you start to look alike]” stresses the Artistic Director of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Orestis Andreadakis, while Carlo Chatrian mentions that with this special tribute “we have tried to expand the notion of the monster: by selecting films that question the idea of “normality”, we hope to contribute to the political debate that is at the heart of our “pluralistic” societies".
The long-established bilingual special thematic edition of the Festival is connected to the large tribute of this year's Festival and will include texts and analyses by cinema theorists, sociologists and journalists. The edition includes essays from the Swiss writer and former editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique Mona Chollet, the professor in the Department of Political Sciences of the AUTh Nicolas Sevastakis, Orestis Andreadakis and the Festival’s Publications Coordinator Geli Mademli. It also features an editorial text by Carlo Chatrian and a presentation of the films.
The theme of the tribute also inspires the central exhibition of this year’s edition. The Festival commissioned works from two artists, Malvina Panagiotidi and David Sampethai, which will engage in dialogue with each other and will be presented at the MOMus- Experimental Center for the Arts, curated by Orestis Andreadakis. The exhibition will take place during the 65th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, with free admission for the public, while the opening will take place on Friday, November 1st.
Discover some of the films of the tribute:
In Eyes Without a Face (1960) by Georges Franju, surgeon Dr. Génessier, overcome by guilt for causing the disfigurement of his daughter’s face following a car accident, elaborated a devious plan. With the help of Louise, his trusted assistant, he kidnaps young and beautiful women with the purpose of “stealing” their face to surgically restore the look of his daughter, who is for the time being forced to wear a porcelain mask. Gradually, and while the disappearances of young girls keep piling up, the police tracks down the source of all evil and ties the knot around the despaired doctor. Eyes Without a Face, which marked the definitive transition of Franju from documentary to fiction films, triggered extreme reactions in its first screenings. In the course of time it went on to become a point of reference for top-notch film directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, John Carpenter, John Woo, while inspiring Billy Idol to compose the titular famous song. A resourceful variation of the Frankenstein myth, as well as a stunning homage to the fundamentals of German Expressionism, Franju’s film outlines a disturbing study on the fluid notion of identity, the fear of mortality and the deceitful vanity of beauty, while serving as a metaphor for the cinematic construction and illusion.
A little more than a century after the infamous “March on Rome” of Bennito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, which led to the seizing of power by the National Fascist Party, documentary film To Arms, We’re Fascists! (1962) by the husband-and-wife directorial duo of Cecilia Mangini and Lino Del Fra, who teamed up with film critic and historian Lino Miccichè, stands as a commanding and ominous reminder and warning. The movie unfolds half a century of Italian history, from the jubilee to the centennial of the Unification of Italy, through rare and valuable archival footage. From the Italian Invasion of Libya to the Versailles Treaty, and then on from the horror of the Fascist regime to the Partisan Resistance, the turmoil of the post-WWII period and the dramatic events of the Reggio Emilia Massacre in July 1960, this shuttering journey places Italy’s historical memory and unhealed traumas of the past under the microscope. In a painful closure, it dares to utter a dark question that remains up-to-date, scratching the surface of the most uncomfortable answers: are we really through with Fascism?
The Beast (1975) by Walerian Borowczyk speaks its intentions loud and clear from the very start, leaving every hint of modesty, shyness and taboo out of the door. The head of a family of noble origin found in financial dire straits feels his lack has changed when Lucy, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, accepts – for reasons of her own – to marry the disfigured and mentally disabled son. However, as soon as the two families meet up, and while a series of forbidden fantasies visit Lucy in her dreams (?), the dark secrets of the aristocracy and archetypal myths are blended in, interweaving dreams with reality. Sex scenes that stirred turmoil, awkwardness and surprise, while paving the way for films such as Possession by Andrej Żuławski, a ingenious mix of Gothic tradition and the French erotic farse, a relentless sarcasm towards the suppression of carnal desire and the suffocating morals and the innate hypocrisy of prudishness, are only a handful of the honorary badges that accompany a film that will never cease to be labeled as provocative.
Tonia Marketaki’s groundbreaking directorial debut, John the Violent (1973), draws inspiration from real events that took place in Greece in the turbulent 1960s, in a pioneering (and not only by Greek standards) courthouse drama: a movie that rakes up fragmented versions of an incomplete mosaic of truth, consolidating that seeking the one and only truth equals to a chimera chase. John Zachos, a highly disturbed young man lacking mental and sexual balance, lives out his erotic fantasies by resorting to purifying violence, struggling to cover his manhood deficit and the lack of respect he experiences. When arrested he immediately confesses his crimes, which comes as a great relief for the police force, blamed by the press for inefficiency. Delving into the inherent theatricality nested in every attempt to do justice and represent any criminal act, Marketaki’s film dissects a series of merciless conflicts (society vs. individuality, spirit of the law vs. letter of the law), while outlining a suffocating and ominous portrait of an entire era. The movie will be screened with universally accessible terms within the framework of the 65th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, thanks to the support of Alpha Bank, the Festival’s Accessibility Sponsor.
In Peppermint Candy (1999), his sophomore feature film, Lee Chang-dong weaves an elaborate narrative that moves backwards in time, sketching a bleak portrait of the dramatic events that took place in South Korea over the last twenty years of the 20th century. Divided in an exemplary manner into seven chapters of escalating tension, Peppermint Candy traces the prescribed course of dehumanization and destruction of Young-ho, a (once) romantic young student who dreamed of becoming a photographer. The military dictatorship and the bloody Gwangju Uprising in the early 1980s, the lack of freedom and the repression that marked Korean society in the following years, the violent economic transformation and the Asian financial crisis of 1997 are refracted through the story of a common man who found himself trapped between forces that surpassed him. The ever-open wounds of the past, personal stories crushed under the weight of history, guilt that cannot find refuge in oblivion and the irrevocable loss of innocence bring to the surface the most relentless monster that lurks out there: a life wasted, love that slipped away, time that was irretrievably lost.
In Sasquatch Sunset (2024) by David and Nathan Zellner, two of the most idiosyncratic figures in contemporary American independent cinema, four sasquatch nomads wander the wilds of northern California for a year, hoping to meet other survivors of their kind, while struggling to make it in an ever-changing, filled with threats, environment. Based on the bigfoot myth, one of North America's most popular and timeless tales, the Zellner brothers map out an epic journey of survival and resilience, sometimes humorous and sometimes heartbreaking, in a film without dialogue, where the performances are based entirely on kinetic skills and non-verbal expressiveness. At the end of the journey, it becomes clear that the most threatening monsters are the ones our minds construct to cast away and ostracize anything they find incomprehensible and repulsive.
The full list of films will be announced soon.
More about Carlo Chatrian
Carlo Chatrian (1971) has studied Literature and Philosophy at Torino University. He holds a degree in cinema, with an essay on Jacques Rivette.He has been programmer for Alba Film Festival, Festival dei Popoli and Visions du Réel. He held workshops with filmmakers such as Johan Van der Keuken, Frederick Wiseman, Errol Morris. He edited books on Nanni Moretti, Nicolas Philibert, Claire Simon. From 2003 to 2018 he worked at Locarno Festival, where he curated a special program on Japanese Animation and retrospectives on Ernst Lubitsch, Vincente Minnelli and Otto Preminger, before taking on the role of artistic director (2013 to 2018), hosting tribute to the French Nouvelle Vague and the cinema of West Germany. During six editions at Locarno, filmmakers such as Lav Diaz, Hong Sangsoo, Albert Serra, Wang Bing and actresses such as Brie Larson and Ariane Labed have been awarded and recognized. In June 2018, he was appointed artistic director at the Berlin International Film Festival, holding this post for five editions (2020/2024). Since June 2020, he has been a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Science
