On Tuesday November 5th, the most crucial election day of recent history, the 65th Thessaloniki International Film Festival is hosting a special event dedicated to the 2024 American presidential election. Initially, the shattering documentary Homegrown directed by Michael Premo will be screened at 8.30pm at Tonia Marketaki theater. The screening will be followed by a discussion featuring Nicolas Sevastakis, Professor at AUTh’s School of Political Sciences, the Festival’s artistic director Orestis Andreadakis, and journalist-head of the Journalists' Union of Macedonia and Thrace Daily Newspapers Yannis Kotsifos, who will delve into the elections that will determine to a great extent the course of the USA and the entire world in the next five years to come.
Michael Premo’s film is a disarming documento on Donald Trump’s America. In Homegrown, we are a heartbeat away from three passionate – yet entirely different – supporters of Donald Trump, who set out on a cross-country journey in the summer of 2020, determined to help re-elect their favored President. Though their efforts didn’t result in the outcome they desired, they ultimately became intertwined with one of the most notorious events in recent American history: The storming of the Capital.
One can hardly find a more poignant way to grasp the momentum of the deep cleavage that has been sweeping the core of the country over the last years. Homegrown offers an intimate portrayal of the individuals and the unseen (anti)heroes, capturing the chaos and polarization that have been steadily undermining the core of American society. It explores how the decline of democratic discourse, the rise of absurdity and intolerance, and the unwavering belief among many American conservatives that anything left of their ideological stance equates to communism, have all contributed to the disintegration of what once seemed to be a firmly established democratic system.
In the discussion that will take the baton from the film’s screening, Nicolas Sevastakis, Orestis Andreadakis and Yannis Kotsifos will comment on the critical conjuncture of our times and the pre-election campaign conducted by Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, while laying out a thorough analysis and making their own set of predictions and estimations for the pivotal election night.
