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Screening of M. Karagatsis by Yorgos Gkikapeppas, in collaboration with COSMOTE TV

The documentary M. Karagatsis by Yorgos Gkikapeppas, part of the series “The Generation of the 30s”, a production by COSMOTE TV, the Festival’s Grand Sponsor, was screened on Friday March 18, celebrating its premiere within the context of the 24^th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, at Tonia Marketaki theater. The characters of the first great fiction trilogy by the greatest Greek storyteller, the daring and provocative M. Karagatsis, take flesh and blood in this episode, in which characters and scenes from his works are cinematically interwoven in his fictional imagination.

The documentary was prefaced by the Artistic Director of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Orestis Andreadakis, who read the final lines from the swan song of Karagatsis, the legendary novel, 10.

This conversation has no end, we talk ourselves in circles, I don’t suppose you’ve come here tonight to solve the unsolvable, tell me what you want.
I want for you to be interested in the struggle of a suffering world. Without us, the strike is headless and doomed
You’re wrong, there is the unionized organization that leads the fight.
Who? - Pavlopoulos asked sarcastically. Fotis Kontos and his gang? What a laugh….

“This “what a laugh” was the last thing Karagatsis wrote in September 1962, in his final unfinished novel, “10”. However, his words, thoughts and books are still alive. And we are thrilled that they stay alive through works like this one, like the remarkable documentary by Yorgos Gkikapeppas, a COSMOTE TV production, as part of a documentary series about the Generation of the 30s”.

The Head of COSMOTE TV, Dimitris Michalakis, took the floor to say: “We are particularly happy to host a screening of a documentary which we consider to be one of the documentaries that include the sample writing we are interested in. We wish our director and our producer, Yorgos Gkikapeppas and Vicky Nikolaou, could be here, while we had also arranged for the attendance of writer Christos Chomenidis, who unfortunately could not make it due to Covid-related circumstances. This is a docudrama and through this kind of documentary we try to achieve yet another goal we have as COSMOTE TV and COSMOTE HISTORY. We are very interested in being able to utilize documentary so as to tell stories and promote unknown aspects of our history to audiences that are not familiar with documentaries, especially younger audiences. This is one of our main purposes. We offer COSMOTE HISTORY to all Greek schools for free and until now, only 100 schools have shown interest. Every school can access documentaries from COSMOTE HISTORY. We have more than 160 docuseries at the moment, all of which were produced from 2016 and onwards. They are our productions and co-productions that treat themes such as geography, customs and traditions, culture, religion, and anything related to Greece”, he said.

“We are at a stage where we will be broadening our agenda, but still within the context of Greece-related themes. I would like to kindly ask you, as ambassadors who will visit a festival and are certainly connected on social media and have friends who are interested in documentary, occasioned by the work you will see today, to also become spokesmen of this genre that is so much more popular than we thought. For instance, COSMOTE HISTORY is at the moment the most watched channel, overtaking National Geographic and BBC Earth, which makes us really proud and enables us to continue investing in the content”, he added. “I am sure you will enjoy what you are about to watch and I hope that you spread the word. It is content that we provide for free on YouTube as well, and to schools as I mentioned earlier, via a platform that is user-friendly and can be installed in any desktop”, he concluded.