Festival films

“In 1981 I started working with Nikos on this job. 30 years have passed so fast. I really enjoy socializing here with people, to having fun together. We didn’t make money, but it was beautiful.” Nikos and Thodoris have a repair shop for Vespas in Chania, Crete. Just before their retirement, with grease and bearings on their hands, they host us in their daily lives.
A single episode from ERT’s TV series Docville.

Fearlessly dissecting the process of creative thinking (and the cost of living creatively!) this is an atmospheric intimate portrait of drummer Michal “Gier” Giercuszkiewicz, whose lifelong ambition has been to compose and record an album of original music. It’s a promise that Gier made to the world and to himself three decades earlier. A promise which, plagued by self-doubt, he is yet to deliver on. But the dream does not end there. The musician hopes to record his opus magnum in his self-built rafthouse, in a remote corner of Poland – the secluded mountain region of Bieszczady. The film follows Gier – a hero that is both fascinating and unafraid to show weakness – through what might be his final attempt at finding creative fulfillment.

When the promise of an Arab Spring swept the region and word of protests calling for the Syrian regime to be overthrown reached Damascus, young, independent video reporter Lina and her group of hopeful, cosmopolitan compatriots celebrated the arrival of revolution. In order to avoid detection from the state and its directed and implied violence, Lina learned to embrace multiple identities to survive and continue reporting. As the months turned to years, the heady early days slowly became an ever-present brutal grind, chewing up relationships, futures, and lives.

A motor-sports spectacle that kicks up plenty of dust. On the trail of the 2007 Dakar Rallye, 7915 KM undertakes a search, along the way encountering the variety to be found in Africa’s present in Morocco, Sahrawi Republic, Mauritania, Mali, and Senegal. 7915 KM demonstrates the extent of this distance, which is the result of political and economic conditions, and also the ideas and prejudices to be found in both Europe and Africa. It also makes the closeness tangible, which becomes clear in the stories of everyday life, work, hopes, and worries. Keeping the sobering reality in mind, it creates an homage to humanity and slowness which questions deep-seated perceptions and the role of Europeans in numerous, presumably African, problems.

Since 1926 family and friendship, playgrounds and neighborhood, innovation and solidarity, have been the “secret blend” of the luminous course of the Kliafa soft drinks Company. A small world of creativity and humanity, built in Trikala, Greece, around one man’s vision “...to cool and sweeten the world!”

Within the human struggle to live and work on a changing planet, questions of value, extraction, and adaptation echo across seemingly disparate worlds. A Common Sequence examines shifts of life and labor through a critically-endangered salamander and plant patents in the apple industry. Weaving the stories of Dominican nuns running a conservation lab, a group of fishermen attempting to live off of a depleting lake, engineers developing AI-driven harvesting machines, and an indigenous biomedical researcher resisting the commodification of human DNA, the film becomes a meditation on the shifting border between the natural and unnatural world, and the dynamics of power at play.

In this deeply personal new documentary from James Ivory, the Oscar-winning filmmaker uncovers boxes of film he shot during a life-changing trip to Afghanistan in 1960. The film was never completed and the footage stayed in a box unseen for 60 years. In 2022, aged 94, he decided to revisit this unique material as a means to look back at his younger self and to unravel how this unlikely journey far from his hometown in Oregon helped form the celebrated filmmaker he was to become. This glorious, color footage unleashes a Proustian reverie during which Ivory recounts his life as traveler, outsider, and artist. Alternating between the incredible moving images he recorded as a curious visitor in Kabul and Bamiyan and his own personal story growing up in the Western States, coming to terms with his own sexual identity, and embarking on what would become a legendary career, Ivory has made a film (co-directed with Giles Gardner and featuring music by Alexandre Desplat) about the voyages we all take, around the globe and within our own interior landscapes.

Τhe teenage dance team of Neos Voutzas Sports Club continues its courses online, during the Covid-19 pandemic. They turn their rooms into dance halls and at the same time prepare for the exams, in an effort to overcome the trauma of a fire that devastated the area and marked the recent history of Greece.

This documentary explores the cinematic elements of George Seferis’s poem “Thrush,” the poet’s references to the art of cinema, as presented in his diaries and his essays, ultimately highlighting an ambivalent attitude of the poet towards cinema.

Greece, 1977. A proposed law brings gay men and “transvestites” together in a historic event and sparks the creation of the first Greek LGBT movement. For the next 13 years, AKOE and its magazine Amfi, would define the way LGBT Greeks think about themselves. This film celebrates their story and legacy.

What if from one day to the next, you’re no longer seen, but instead are stared at? The leading characters of this fascinating narrative have ended up in a new world where suddenly nothing seems to align. In their new lives in the Netherlands, they unintentionally provoke reactions on a daily basis. Even after many years, they still hear the same questions over and over again: where are you from, do you speak Dutch, do you tan in the sun? While contemplating what it means to belong, who gets excluded, and how outsider status is continually reaffirmed, Padidar’s film foregrounds the sensation of being looked at. Honest, painful, and humorous encounters with three other ‘newcomers’ to the Netherlands are stylistically interwoven between Padidar’s own personal history, opening up a vulnerable space of articulation with global resonance. A confessional collage with no simple outs, the film turns the spotlight on all of us, while simultaneously asking: who is “us”?

A happy and enchanted landscape, a doll snatched away from a little girl and thrown into the fire. This surprising cinematic encounter traces the life of Cristina Bernhard, born in 1939 into a modest family of farmers and cattle breeders. Her fairytale childhood surrounded by mountains and lush meadows is abruptly interrupted by the death of her mother. The arrival of her stepmother will change her life forever. Mistreatment and violence will force her to leave her village at a very young age and to achieve happiness far away from her beloved mountains. Combining fairy tale and documentary, this unique film is an opportunity to get closer to childhood and unknown existential and emotional territories; the meeting with Cristina and her diary is an invitation to discover irony and forgiveness as a cure for one's suffering.

A marriage in crisis – what could be more normal, more easily recognizable? And yet, for such a mundane matter of the modern bourgeois world to take on unprecedented dimensions, all it takes is a camera to find a spot inside the “war zone.” Not only because the most familiar of situations are, in fact, the least well known, but also because the cinematic lens has that terrifying power: to turn even common experience – when it captures its unwrought core – into a thing of awe. And so, in A Married Couple, that which is ostensibly uninteresting due to its utter banality (in the very first scene, the couple bicker over something trivial) becomes, in due course, so intense that it is often hard to look, even though you know full well your eyes will be glued to the screen right up until very the last moment. And this is because (whatever it is we think, whatever it suits us to believe, just to get through) so much truth cannot be taken in without resistance – and such resistance serves as proof that something of the most serious and ongoing relevance to us all has been expressed here with a painful honesty.

In the 1940s, Orson Welles navigates his meteoric Hollywood rise. As WWII begins, an American boy visits abroad, and an American soldier enlists. A complex, elaborate collection of stories leading to the year 1947, immersing the audience in the era like never before, through rare archival footage, and innovative 3D modeling. Discover the humble beginnings and hidden secrets of one of cinema’s most iconic directors, and how he shaped the culture of Hollywood as we know it.

“A feature documentary about the history of the camera and our present-day media culture - a humorous and thought-provoking film about the impact it has on our lives.” A meticulous dissection of image-making and a mapping of its movement through society, the directors use a mind-boggling array of archival footage to collage this sociological study by tracking the transmogrification of photographic philosophy and technology over human history. Weaving and contrasting some of the most iconic, harrowing, and viral images in our collective memory with user-generated footage that transports the viewer through time, space, and experience, the filmmakers intricately fashion an argument about how humans see ourselves that feels rigorous, learned, and current. Balancing critical examination with delightful surprises, they put their footage in cacophonous, lively, enlightening conversation. For a film concerned with the construction of images, Fantastic Machine does that very thing with smarts, humor, and great stamina.

Inspired by Iranian cinema and the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad, a young female director from India journeys to Tehran to witness how resistance becomes a daily act of survival in Iranian society. Despite stringent censorship of the Islamic Regime the director collects a series of eloquent and candid interviews with filmmaker Jafar Panahi, activists and everyday women. Over six years, these conversations with the camera expertly capture the simmering anxieties, fears, hopes and dreams of a nation on the cusp of revolution. “In November 2022, a historic struggle for liberation has been shaking Iran to its very foundations for over 70 days [...] a struggle by Iranian women. Over the last six years, the camera witnessed the pent-up anxieties, fears, hopes, and dreams of a society on the verge of a revolution.” This is the card that opens a passionate declaration of love for the cinema and poetry of Iran, which also offers a frank view of the precarious situation for critics of the regime and shows the uncompromising daily struggle of Iranian women against their oppression.

A funeral car cruises the streets of Medellín, while a young director tells the story of his past in this violent and conservative city. He remembers the preproduction of his first film, a B-Movie with ghosts. The young queer scene of Medellín is casted for the film, but the main protagonist dies of a heroin overdose at the age of 21, just like many friends of the director. Anhell69 explores the dreams, doubts, and fears of an annihilated generation, and the struggle to carry on making cinema. In the words of the director: this is “the immortalization of our recollections, our memory, our life before death, and maybe a warning for the generations and governments to follow.”

A Cypriot flagged German-owned container ship sails the oceans carrying seafarers from Ukraine, Poland, and the Philippines. This is where A Passage takes place, a digitally recorded 360 / VR installation telling the story of a life at sea in a physical, tangible way.

The portrait of an artist as a young woman: When Danish filmmaker Lea Glob first portrayed Apolonia Sokol in 2009, she appeared to be leading a storybook life. The talented Apolonia was born in an underground theater group in Paris and grew up in an artists’ community – the ultimate bohemian existence. In her 20s, she studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, one of the most prestigious art academies in Europe. Over the years, Lea Glob kept returning to film the charismatic Apolonia, and a special bond developed between the two young women. Over the years, Lea kept returning to film Apolonia as she sought her place in the art world, grappling with the agonies and joys of womanhood, the relationships with others, and her own body and creation. 13 years on, the two women continue to reflect on each other's paths in this mesmerizing film about art, love, motherhood, sexuality, representation and how to succeed in a world dominated by patriarchy, capitalism, and war, without losing oneself.

Nurses from Southern Italy crosses the country to try their luck in public exams in the North. Just a few jobs available for thousands of candidates. The majority of them try them several times a year. A nurse from a small town near Naples created a low cost bus service travelling overnight leaving nurses on site to take the exam at dawn.

1919 saw the premiere in New York of Auction of Souls, a silent film about a teenage girl who survived the Armenian genocide and fled to the US. The main role was played by the survivor herself, Aurora Mardiganian. The film was a box office hit, and Mardiganian became world-famous. The massacres in Armenia continued, however, and Mardiganian was engulfed by the waves of relived trauma whipped up by the callous Hollywood publicity machine. Νow, more than a century later, a historical documentary reconstructs the life story of this hero, who died in 1994. Mardiganian’s memoir Ravished Armenia lies at the heart of this chronological animated film. The animated sections are interspersed with rare scenes from the original Hollywood film, most of which has been lost, as well as archive footage of an elderly Mardiganian recalling her remarkable, hellish odyssey. She, like the film’s director Sahakyan, wanted to ensure that the Armenian genocide will never be forgotten.