Festival films

Anna-Maria takes her first steps in life. Orestis takes his first professional steps in painting. Maria finishes high school and makes dreams for her future. All three of them were born with an extra chromosome. All three of them were born with Down Syndrome. They live in Thessaloniki and they are the main characters of this documentary.

Vangelis Raptopoulos. Τhe creator of popular novels such as Diodia (Tolls), Ta tzitzikia (The Cicaadas), O ergenis (The Bachelor), and Loula, among others, completed forty years of writing activity in 2019. In his whole career, he has delivered thirty titles, some of which have been successfully adapted for cinema, theater, and television.

The documentary follows the research and creative process, the timeline and set-up of the greatest Greek graphic novel to this day. A story about archives, storyboards, pencils, papers, and ink, featuring conversations between Soloup and the team of researchers at the National Historical Museum about the “hows” and “whys” of history.

In 1969, bankrupt pizzeria owner Richard Davis invented the modern-day bulletproof vest. To prove that it worked, he shot himself 192 times. Davis then launched “Second Chance,” which became one of the largest body armor companies in the world. Charming and brash, he directed sensational marketing films, earning him celebrity status among police and gun owners across the country. But the death of a police officer wearing a Second Chance vest catalyzes Davis’s fall, revealing a man full of contradictions cultivated over decades of reckless lies. In his first documentary feature, Ramin Bahrani – a pillar of independent cinema, once acclaimed by Roger Ebert as the new great American director – portrays a man equally questionable and captivating, who saved thousands of lives while endangering exponentially more.

In October 2020, the biggest trial in modern Greece comes to an end. The court ruling is clear: The Parliament’s third-largest party over several years is a criminal organization. What is it like to cover such a trial for five and a half years? A conversation with the people who were there.

A documentary film journey into the life and work of one of the greatest modern architects Alvar Aalto. The film shares for the first time the intimate, heart-breaking love story of Alvar and his architect wife Aino Aalto, while taking the viewer on a cinematic tour to their creative processes and iconic buildings all over the world. A charming documentary that organically combines entertainment and knowledge, contemporary film material and rare unforeseen footage, based on profound research and narrated by eyewitnesses and top researchers from all over the world.

An educational documentary by Robert Manthoulis, Fotis Mesthenaios and Iraklis Papadakis, filmed under the archaeological guidance of Yannis Miliadis, Director of the Acropolis Museum, who is also the narrator. The film is a wonderfully consistent mapping of the Acropolis site, its objects, spaces, iconography, and connection with history and tradition. From the opening moments and the presentation of the complexity and uniqueness of its location, and through the highlighting of every striking detail within a wider artistic context, the film takes us on a journey through time, connecting the centuries of the Athenian history glory to the present day, with the monument framed not only as the glowing monument of an old civilization, but also in relation to its current position above a great, modern city. At a time when the works of Robert Manthoulis were already winning awards and traveling abroad and he, as a member of the “Group of Five,” was passionately promoting the art of documentary filmmaking and public education, Acropolis found distribution in a memorable way, through a screening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which led to its sale to a number of universities in America and around the world. The film will be screened in a digital copy (DCP), featuring English subtitles and Greek subtitles for the Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (SDH).

A unique shelter for dogs in Europe, it is a place where animal controllers bring stray dogs impounded daily on the outskirts of the city. Showing the process of training these dogs, the film, itself a metaphor, deals with a current social issue – the subjugation of the individual to the will of authority. Establishing a parallel between dog shelters and societies, the film re-examines the hierarchies of power, as well as the relativity of any authority that renders us obedient through the exercise of reward and punishment.

Unaccompanied minor refugees in Greece. Where do they come from; how and why? What are their needs and dreams? Do they go to school like other children of their age? How do they feel there? The crucial question determining their future: “Whose children are these?” The Greek volunteer group “Foster Teachers” contributed with this film to the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY project “Teaching to Hope: Saving the education of refugee teens during and after the pandemic's school shutdowns.”

As the war in Eastern Ukraine takes a heavy toll on poor families living near the frontline, a small group of strong-willed social workers work tirelessly in a special kind of orphanage to create an almost magical safe space for kids to live in while the state authorities and courts decide the future fate of the child and family.

“Reality does not exist”: This is the motto of the chaotic and open music band named “Aera Patera.” When time comes for some band members, who are exhausted by the never-ending haywire, to ask for some structure, Jimmy, the band’s informal leader, has to either compromise or combat again a reality that “does not exist.”

A walk around down-town Athens evokes the director’s memories from an era of early youth. A walk as if it is a love letter to lovers and selves of the past. Questions about how female identity is hammered rise in a circular motion, like in the eternal circle of sun and rain, life and death..

Alphonso Ford was a successful basketball player, carrying a big secret. Far from the bright lights of the basketball courts, Ford was fading away with leukemia. This is the incredible story of one of the biggest scorers that ever played in Europe and at the same time the story of the greatest American basketball player, Americans have never heard of.

A piece of white marble stone mined in Greece takes us on its Odyssey along the global consumption driven by the Chinese domestic market, to investigate the role of China as the “world’s buyer.” This film follows marble from its homeland to the other side of the world, where it is processed for sale back to the West. As the condition of world commerce constantly shifts and changes, we encounter those whose lives are devoted to the commoditization of things both ancient and new.

A film that can be understood as a gesture of love and justice towards people and spaces that represent an idea of home for the author. In three interwoven stories, a married old man, the memory of the suicide of a person who spent his last days spending and giving away his belongings, and an extensive shooting of one Jacques Audiard’s latest films draw an intimate portrait of the mountain village.

In the village of Megendi in Ethiopia, maternity care is changing. Caught in the midst of the shift, a community of women explore how best to provide for expectant mothers. At the center, a 25-year-old woman weighs what is expected of her against what she needs, bringing past pain to the surface. Working through her discomfort, she finds solace in her fellow women and the godfather of her child. As the story unfolds, she uncovers her true wishes and with them, an unshakeable desire to remain loyal to her heart.

The availability of the home video camera changed the way common people in East Asia see themselves and the world: the excitement/discomfort about the ability to control the making of moving images for the first time; the (self-)invitations to perform and present; the half-staged, voyeuristic and unconscious recording of the family.

An interrogation of the American Dream that reveals clashing realities and stunning disparities: As Vincent Harding asked back then, the film asks now: “Is America possible?” Hundreds of seething tales of conflict, transcendence, and exhilaration in the enticing but bewildering USA are never seen on T.V. The film’s stories reflect a nation wrestling with the project of democracy while the world watches with bated breath. We have always wondered if the American Dream is real. And we have always speculated on its death. Its glittering image in the world has diminished in recent years, but most Americans are still trying to hold on to the American Dream’s ideals. As Langston Hughes put forth: “The land that never has been yet.” The film’s eclectic cast includes a young Pakistani-American woman who overcame Islamophobia and bipolar disorder to become a poet of repute; an Air Force RF/SATCOM technician who served in Afghanistan haunted by the civilians killed in drone strikes he guided; and a Black man who was shot and disabled from the waist down at 17 but transcended tragedy to become a Paralympics powerlifter.

Little Uli wants to become a pirate or the pope, but in no case does she want to fit into the role stereotypes of her Bavarian hometown. After her father’s death, her mother hands over his “secret” box to her as an interheritance. The content suddenly changes her view of the father, herself, her family, and the society in which she grew up. A true story about family secrets, gender issues and the turmoil of love – told as a roller coaster ride through animated and documentary imagery.

Mount Athos is a recollection of Divinity. A place that constantly shapeshifts, similarly to the way mountain ridges change as we wander around them. A place whose residents experience a total breach of the traditional notion of time.

On a Greek island named Symi, people believe in miracles. The film starts from there, in 2018, to explore the relationship of man with faith and knowledge, physic and metaphysic. Faith is something personal and inner. Knowledge and how humans handle it concern society and citizens. The filming of empty New York City, because of the pandemic, in 2020, raises thoughts and questions, which unpredictably, almost metaphysically match and complement each other with the footage that was shot two years before.