28th TiDF: Honorary Golden Alexander and tribute to pioneering filmmaker Vouvoula Skoura

The 28th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival turns its spotlight on the unique and singular filmmaker Vouvoula Skoura, whose works redefine our relation to memory, history and time.

This year’s edition will also showcase a total of 20 films directed by Vouvoula Skoura, an interdisciplinary and highly innovative Greek artist and filmmaker, who draws materials, methods and techniques from various forms of art, crafting a multilayered universe, where history is intertwined with the little, fragile and everyday human stories. In addition, her film Etel Adnan: Words in Exile (2007) will be screened with accessible terms, thanks to the support of Alpha Bank, the Festival’s Accessibility Sponsor.

Vouvoula Skoura will be present in Thessaloniki, and will be bestowed with the Festival’s honorary Golden Alexander, as a small token of appreciation and recognition for her profound and lasting contribution to the art of cinema and contemporary culture.

Vouvoula Skoura introduces us to a new dimension of experimental cinema, one that flows in between visual and graphic arts, exploring the boundaries of narrative and imagery. Her work unfolds in contemplative manner rather than in linear structures and renegotiates ideas while reminding us that universal values remain the fundamental basis of life. Making use of contemporary technology she creates film essays, movies and video art, often focusing on iconic personalities such as Etel Adnan, Giorgos Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, James Joyce and Melpo Axioti, whereas other times she places issues such as immigration, love and the sense of belonging on the center stage.

Moreover, the Festival will undertake the cost for the restoration of Vouvoula Skoura’s films Inner Migration and Skoria Fotos that will be carried out by the Greek Film Archive’s Laboratory for the Digital Restoration of Films. This initiative comes to compliment the Festival’s efforts for the restoration of the most iconic films of Greek cinema, within the framework of the tributes hosted.

Vouvoula Skoura was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied Graphic Arts at the Athens Technology Institute [A.T.I.]. She lived in London during the Greek dictatorship. She attended courses in Art History [1970] and a graduate course in computer graphics for video at Middlesex Polytechnic [1988]. For many years, she has been involved with experimental multimedia photographic techniques. Her works in film and video have been presented at international festivals and universities in over fifty cities, and has collaborated with many artistic organizations in Greece and abroad.

Her films Inner Migration (1984) and Skoria Fotos (1989) were both commended at the Drama Short Film Festival, Greece. Her video Black Moon won the First Prize in the Athens Video Art Competition, 1998. Etel Adnan: Words in Exile (2008) won the Greek Film Centre Award at the 10th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. On the occasion of her participation in the 11th Chania Film Festival, with the trilogy The Subject of Exile: Etel Adnan, James Joyce, Melpo Axioti, she was awarded a prize for her work as an artist and filmmaker. The Greek Graphic Designers Association awarded her its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

The tribute’s films:

Inner Migration (1984) traces a woman’s inner migration through her childhood memories and the depiction of places and situations. In 1950, in her village in Macedonia, Northern Greece, we see her as a 10-year-old child; in 1956, in Thessaloniki, at the age of 16; and in 1960, her marriage in Athens marks a new phase of her life. Inner Migration, the director’s most autobiographical film, raises, in a pioneering manner, for its time, the issue of a woman's violent separation from her environment. At the same time, her transition from her place of birth to another place becomes the occasion for an internal journey through the times and spaces of memory. She is followed by echoes of the civil war, rock’n’roll, the poets she loved – Kostas Karyotakis, Titos Patrikios, Andreas Embirikos, books, films.

Skoria Fotos (1989) is based on a film collage that reproduces computer-processed erotic imagery from classical antiquity alongside contemporary photographs and live-action footage. Through a variety of filming techniques, a peculiar construction emerges in which the aesthetics of modern technology do not dominate; instead, a highly personal vision comes to the fore. The subject of the film revolves around the diptych “Eros–Death,” a theme long familiar in the history of art. Still lifes allude to painters such as Morandi, Caravaggio, and López. The acceptance of the ancient and modern artistic heritage operates simultaneously with its rejection, as it is subjugated through the destruction of the images and the materials.

The films Giorgos Seferis: Poet and Citizen. A Journey in Space and Time (2000) and Giorgos Seferis: Poet and Citizen. The Experience of Love + War and Decay (2000) present a vast photographic archive – like a long journey through the 20th century – featuring documents from the life of Giorgos Seferis, period materials from around the world, and records from the places the poet traveled. The short films about Giorgos Seferis and his poetry are part of a wider artistic project commissioned by the Greek Ministry of Culture to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the poet and Nobel Prize winner in 2000.

In Philoktetes – The Wound (2000) the theme of violence transforms the physical face into something fluid. It alludes to Francis Bacon’s portraits. Pain is finally altered. Death has solidified, and the dead animals – although they continue to fly – belong to an image “frozen” and finally peaceful.

Through fragments of pictures, through cracks, we witness love, anger, murder as an extreme action, and Medea’s “exile,” already decided; memories of function, revenge, and punishment. In Medea - No Comment (2001) love is the Memory. And Jason’s absence – even as a black-and-white picture – is exactly the admission of her big love. The music comes from central Asia; it’s her own memory, a past that becomes the future as well; a return into Mourning, without any Guilt.

The references to the Renaissance of the great painters, to figures who left their mark on the 20th century (Beckett, Man Ray, Buuel, Eisenstein) to architectural models – Hadrian's Villa, the Villa d' Este, the Capitol, the Vatican, the E.U.R. – from an ensemble in the film Sibyls (2002) that pertains to "Sibylline discourse" through the use of the double image. А discourse that is unpredictable, internal, mystical and most of all silent, one that foresees the end of innocence (part I), of indecipherable love (part II), of death (part III), of despair (part IV). But also with the masses being dispersed for centuries now by the brutality of the powers that be, which leads the individual to isolation or madness. And at the end, the silent, despairing song of the Sibyl, in the shadow of the buildings of the fascist perioр (E.U.R.), signals her return as "prophecy".

Etel Adnan: Words in Exile (2007) outlines a unique portrait of the poet and painter Etel Adnan through a multiplicity of visual fragments, languages, peoples and their identities. The film is based on Adnan’s correspondence with Professor of History Fawwaz Traboulsi and on fragments of her conversations with Vouvoula Skoura as recorded in Paris and the Greek island of Skopelos. The film will be screened with AD: Audio Description for the blind and the visually impaired and SDH: Subtitles for the Deaf or hard of Hearing]. The screening will also include new and unpublished material featuring the very last words of Etel Adnan on colors, Nietzsche and poetry, as recorded by her close friend, Lebanese historian and writer Fawwaz Traboulsi. Twenty years after the film, Vouvoula Skoura returns to find the lost voice of Etel Adnan in a country (Lebanon) torn apart by never-ending historical crevasses.

The film The Four Stages of Cruelty – For Antonin Artaud (2008) was shot 60 years after Antonin Artaud’s death. Attempting a return to the author’s childhood, it examines the field for encountering the ideas, addictions, and people who influenced his oeuvre with new eyes.

In Water on Table – Homage to Odysseas Elytis (2010) Skoura interweaves her love for Odysseas Elytis with fragments of personal memories. In her own words: “A notebook of memory. Family photographs, texts abandoned by others and kept by me. Relics. Heirlooms. Sailing to Aegina – the first images, the sea – clutching Elytis’ Carte Blanche. ‘It’s the girl’, says the poet, ‘with a jug in her hand.’ Milta or the Archetype. It’s ‘Milta,’ the women of the Mediterranean, it’s ‘Milta’ of the sea, of memory, and of poetry. Predominantly the poetry of the word, but also of the image. So I surrendered myself to my memories, to the house, to the book, to the street. Summer, the heat – as ‘The Garden Entered the Sea.’ The time has come to offer them to you, like water on the table.”

In Memory (2012) and In Memory of II (2012) are dedicated to the memory of a 15-year-old boy who was killed by a policeman in Athens, in 2008.

Niki Marangou: Water Surfaces (2012) is a video installation dedicated to the poetess Niki Marangou. Footage from the Green Line dividing Cyprus. Niki Marangou’s poetry unfolds in an anarchic visual rendering. Images of Cyprus expand or become trapped, repeated or not. Their form is changing, the colors too. Portraying the Mediterranean Sea as a woman, the poetess reflects the flows of immigration, of human drifting and displacement, but also the umbilical cord between memory and the freedom of traveling.

THE RED BANK. James Joyce: His Greek Notebooks (2013) is an essay film that uses James Joyce's Greek Notebooks as its raw material and starting point. It translates the non-linear narration into images, unfolding like a puzzle. Shooting took place in Trieste, a city that Joyce once made his home, London, New York and Athens. The film is dedicated to Mando Aravantinou.

In Nanos Valaoritis (2014), the famous Greek poet converses with theatrologist Orsia Sofra about the years during the Colonels’ Regime, when Mantō Aravantinou, in self-imposed exile in Paris (1967–1974), began her research into Joyce’s Greek.

In the film Eveline 2020 (2020), the multilingual landscape, together with the continuous and repetitive image of the sea, are the elements that represent her inner, emotional space. There is a sudden interruption of the film: breaking news. Moving images and photos of an Irish Navy ship whose name is Lé James Joyce, and had the mission to save refugees in the Mediterranean Sea; simultaneously, a girl sings a contemporary song, inconsistent with the form and action of the film. Is this girl Eveline in 2020, or maybe not? We return to the third part of the film and the narrative flow of Joyce’s short story. A ship, a black ship. Is it the ship of the journey that Eveline denied, or is it the ship that the refugees are hoping for?

In I Hear an Army (2022) fragments of narration mold time by tracing the rhythm of war, each war. They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore. My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

Contrabando: Seeking Melpo (2023) unravels the life of Melpo Axioti, a modern Greek novelist and poetess. A navigation in the labyrinth of her life and her expression, as analyzed by the psychiatrist Spilios Argyropoulos.

In the film UTOPIA. The Poetics of Borders: Berlin – Nicosia (2025) that will premiere at the 28th TIDF, images become rootings, cultural deviations with no beginning or end, a kind of metastasis that forms the unity of the Mediterranean Sea. Through the verbal paths that run through the divided city of Nicosia, claiming the freedom of creativity, poetess Niki Marangou reflects the flows of immigration, human wandering and displacement, as well as the umbilical cord between memory and journey. The beginning. A one-take shot, images of Famagusta, as Pyrros Theofanopoulos recites the text of Niki Marangou, while the gaze of Niovi Charalambous describes the dead city. Composing images and secret connotations that map out the signs of people as they travel, following the routes of memory. Words flow across divided grounds and lands of exile, yearning to overcome separation lines and borders. Niki in Cyprus, Niki in Berlin.

In Etel Adnan: Undying Colours (2026) we hear Etel Adnan’s last words recorded by her close friend, the Lebanese historian and writer Fawwaz Traboulsi, on colours, Nietzsche and poetry. Twenty years after her film Etel Adnan: Words in Exile (2007), the filmmaker returns to find Etel Adnan’s lost voice in a Lebanon marked by ongoing historical fractures.