Festival films

This is the true story of a 13-year-old Japanese girl who never returned home one dark November night in 1977. Decades later, her parents discover the bizarre truth – their daughter was abducted by North Korean spies.The film is a human drama of a mother and father’s grief and endless devotion, framed in a moving 30-year long search for their vanished child.An ordinary banker and housewife get caught up in an extraordinary international conflict; their personal tragedy lies at the center of one of today’s most talked-about, most emotionally-charged human rights and political crises in the East.

Absolute Wilson chronicles the epic life, times and creative genius of Robert Wilson, revealing for the first time one of the most controversial, rule-breaking and downright mysterious artists of our era. More than a biography, the film becomes an exploration of the transformative power of creativity itself – and the tale of a boy who grew up as a troubled and learning-disabled outsider in the American South only to become a fearless artist with a profoundly original perspective to share with the world. Along the way, the film introduces an array of admirers, friends and critics – ranging from musician David Byrne to the late writer Susan Sontag to composer Phillip Glass and singer Jessye Norman, among others – who add insight to the view of how Wilson’s work emerged from an extraordinary life and a ceaseless yearning to communicate.

A poem made up of the names of 20 cities from Minas Gerais, Brazil is the rhythmic form of this film open to chance and improvisation. Compelled by the names of these cities, the crew visits each of them for the first time. In its motion of immersion and submersion, the film intertwines two narrative layers – one shaped by the story of the poem and the other by the ordinary events that accidentally happen before the camera in each city. In Accident, perception is open to allow the mingling with the daily life of each place and at the same time ready to select any event that may relate to the poem and reveal how much life is unpredictable and accidental.

The film follows eight groups of students during the final presentation of their projects for the fourth year course on history and theory, run by Associate Professor Panayotis Tournikiotis. The camera films the students as they describe their understanding of the process of synthesis that resulted in projects such as: a house for two families on Spetses island by Aris Constantinidis (1966-67), Hanselmann House by Michael Graves (1967), Turégano House by Alberto Campo Baeza (1989), Schroeder House by Gerrit Rietveld (1924-25), a single family house at Psyhiko-Athens by Zoi Samourka (1994-99), Saltzman House by Richard Meier (1967-69), Villa Planeix by Le Corbusier (1924), and, finally, Villa Dall’Ava by Rem Koolhaas (1991). A week later, a second shooting session affords us a chance for a retrospective visit to the work of the aforementioned architects through the projects presented by the students. The two interwoven narrations formulate α cinematic narrative structure at the very core of which one will find not the well-known projects themselves, but rather students expressing their thoughts on the education of the architect and the nature of architecture in a contemporary environment.

Chin left her daughter in China and came to Israel to make a living. She cleaned Ehud’s house, and they fell in love. Sasha never considered immigrating to Israel. But four years after his wife left Russia with their daughter, he left a thriving business behind only to find himself in Tel Aviv’s worst neighborhood. Marisol grew up as a Jewish Princess in Lima Peru and came to Israel to learn something about life. An unexpected pregnancy alters her plans. These and other characters meet in a Hebrew language Ulpan where their personal stories meld with the complexities of Israeli reality.The immense effort of learning a new language is revealed through their encounter with a strange culture and an unfamiliar environment

Boreak was eight when he lost his right arm in a landmine accident. His parents decided to send him to a home in Siem Reap for young landmine victims. Despite his tragedy, Boreak is ever optimistic and lacking in self-pity. Like most children, he is mischievous and inquisitive. He wants to be a wrestler, a rap artist, a football player. And he rarely acts as if his disability is a hindrance.Through Boreak, we also meet Aki Ra, a former child soldier, trained by the Khmer Rouge army to lay landmines. Now in his 30s, Aki Ra is haunted by his violent past and hopes to make amends by giving children like Boreak a home and by helping remove the millions of landmines still buried in his country.

Dr. Aris Poulianos, anthropologist, was born on the Northeastern Aegean island of Icaria. Now in his mid-80s, Dr. Poulianos was a fighter from an early age and caused controversy among Greek scientists by introducing his theory of an alternative model of human evolution. But what is even more controversial and interesting is his life and times. A rebel in the Greek Civil War fighting with the People’s Democratic Army, a refugee in Palestine, a biology student in the US, and an anthropologist at Moscow University, Dr. Poulianos is no ordinary man. A researcher who spent 40 years of his life dedicated to the study of the Archanthropus of Petralona and the ancestors of the archaic homo sapiens in Greece, he was always a man who stood up for his rights and ideas. The film chronicles his life, adventures and personal moments.

In the late 1990s, the oncologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital invited award-winning documentarians Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert to follow five children and their families navigating the ups and downs of cancer treatment.The film provides a view of life on an oncology ward, including profiles of the doctors, nurses, and staff who become champions for the children they care for. But it also ventures outside the hospital and explores the unique personal life of each child – his or her hopes, fears, and relationships with siblings and other family members.As a result, a complex portrait of each family’s individual journey emerges.An intimate look at the lives of Tim, Al, Jenny, Justin, and Alex, A Lion in the House celebrates the enormous strength and bravery of these heroic children.

Depicting the effects of a mid-1980s strike by the employees of a Hormel meat-packing plant in Austin, Minnesota, the film observes both the daily struggles of the striking workers and the behind-the-scenes conflicts amongst the union leaders. Upset at a proposed pay cut, the local union chapter begins the strike against the advice of their parent organization, hiring an outside consultant who encourages the workers.This consultant’s aggressive, no-compromise approach turns the conflict into national news but also alienates management. Soon, despite the efforts of a seasoned negotiator sent by the parent union, the company has locked out the workers and hired scabs, leading to a series of violent conflicts amongst members of the community...

Titled “Amphibious” which is a concept we are developing (like Land Mark, Ciclonismo, [en]tropics, etc...), the video is shot above the water and traces the path of a group of turtles.Amphibious is an interesting word to us. Its etymology (amphi: both + bios: lives) means of a mixed or twofold nature. Its most commonly understood biological definition means “able to live both on land and in water”. It is also linked to military practices- i.e amphibious operations. But also,we are interested in its monstrous philosophical potential. Something un-measurable that exists in more than one realm or form and achieves this through precise enactments or through a very sophisticated internal constitution. In this way, we see amphibious as a productive counter-concept to the more problematic term “ambiguous” – in its currently exhausted state.

Korea’s student movement of the 1980s generated an intense anti-Americanism that spread to mainstream Korean society in the 1990s. The question of why Korean women continued to marry American GIs despite this national sentiment, and what their lives were like thereafter, is the starting point of the film.Ajuma is a former prostitute, now living in New Jersey, who married into the American military. From the moment the director arrives at Ajuma’s home for the first interview to the last taping, the conflicts between director and subject threaten to undermine the project, despite her initial agreement. Most former prostitutes have difficulty “coming out” with revelations about their former occupation, and Ajuma is no exception. Moreover, the director finds that he has to confront his own demons

No artist of the second half of the 20th century was more famous – or in the end more famously misunderstood – than Andy Warhol: at once the most accessible and enigmatic, straightforward and elusive, naive and savagely ironic artist of his time. Grasping, as no one before or since, the function of fame in a mass society, he forced us to confront and re-envision the world we live in.The film exploits in depth the immense Warhol archives at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the complete spectrum of his astonishing artistic output, stretching across five decades from the late 40s to his untimely death in the 80s, his background and history, his family life and formative experiences in Pittsburgh, his crucial experiences as a commercial artist in New York, and his trajectory across three of the most transforming decades of the century.

Anton was born in April 1985. His mother wanted to leave the boy at the maternity hospital; he doesn’t know his father. He was brought up by his blind grandmother.Anton is now 21, a graduate of the Conservatory in Saint-Petersburg and a music composer.

A documentary on the life and work of the Parian poet Archilochos (7th century B.C.), the originator of contemporary poetry who turned his attention to the individual, to universal human passions and emotions, and to erotic desire. The film includes a presentation of his poems, with scholars and university professors speaking about his poetry and his personality. Also included are interviews taken in October 2005 on Paros with the participants in the “Archilochos and His Age” international conference.

The documentary explores the life and work of renowned architect Aris Constantinidis. An emblematic figure of Greek architecture, he was a genuinely nonconformist spirit, who, throughout his life, went up against that which he believed to be false. As an architect, he rejected both the imitation of Western European models as well as the sterile clinging to archaic ones, choosing another path which was based on anonymous architecture: the three-part structure comprising a covered area, a closed room and a yard. This set-up was in perfect harmony with the model of outdoor life which connects antiquity to modern times. The film includes footage from a TV program on which he appeared as well as a series of invaluable radio interviews. His son, Dimitris Constantinidis, also an architect, and Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, an architect and this documentary series’ scientific advisor and presenter, watch Constantinidis’s TV interview and comment on it. The film attempts to analyze Aris Constantinidis’s thoughts via an anthropocentric approach.

The mantinada is a rhyming couplet or a poem made up of two lines, each containing fifteen syllables, which is popular and widely heard in Crete. Aristidis Hairetis was born in Anogia and he is one of the most prominent mantinada lyricists. Love, time, and loss are his beloved themes. Armed with imagination and a sharp wit, he observes everything around him, people and nature, shaping his verse and condensing it into two short lines.

The expedition by the Hellenic Alpine Club of Kalamata to the Pamir mountain range provides the setting for exploring the history and culture of Central Asia, testing the limits of the mountaineers’ endurance and discovering the eerie beauty of the inaccessible summits of the Himalayas. Through Tashkent, Samarkand and Osh, the mountaineers follow the Silk Road, approach the mountain and begin their ascent. The multitude of difficulties – altitude sickness, the unbearable cold, the risks involved in such an undertaking – make their ascent to Mount Lenin at 7.134 meters the experience of a lifetime as the mountaineers transcend themselves by going beyond their limits and capabilities.

In Distomo, a small farming village in Greece, little Argyris survives what most other inhabitants of his native village do not.Within a few hours, he loses his parents and thirty more relatives. The unfathomability of war. In 1949, the orphan boy is taken to the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen, Switzerland. He obtains a Ph.D. at the ETH Zurich, translates Greek authors into German, opposes the military dictatorship in his home country (1967-74) and is later active as a development aid worker on behalf of the Swiss Disaster Relief Corps. All his life, Argyris Sfountouris, a man of winning charm and melancholy cheerfulness, has tackled the horror he was subjected to as a little boy. He has not tried to come to terms with it emotionally. Rather, he has tried to learn to live with it and to do his utmost to prevent it from happening again.

On October 9, 2004, the Beastie Boys handed out 50 cameras to audience members at their sold-out performance in New York’s famed Madison Square Garden.These 50 different passionate perspectives, shot from the point-of-view of the audience, take the viewer deep inside the world of a live Beastie Boys show, prismatically and kinetically capturing the experience of a live musical performance.The film is a cinematic celebration starring, Mike D (Michael Diamond), Adrock (Adam Horovitz), and MCA (Adam Yauch) as the Beastie Boys along with other special appearances by other special guests who are special, especially the camera operators who were especially special.

Fatih Akin, Guillermo Arriaga, Michael Cacoyannis, Renos Charalambidis, Patrice Chereau, Carlos Cuaron, Maria Grazia Cucinotta, Amat Escalante, Ulrich Felsberg, Hrvoje Hribar, Hsiao-Hsien Hou, Antonis Kafetzopoulos, Zenia Kaplan, Alexis Kardaras, Niki Karimi, Cedomir Kollar, Olia Lazaridou, Dora Masclavanou, Despina Mouzaki, Nico Papatakis, Chan-wook Park, Carlos Reygadas, Lucia Rikaki, Danis Tanovic, Constantine Yannaris, Lagia Yourgou: Twenty-eight film professionals varying in age, culture and style answer a questionnaire by Dimitris Yatzouzakis. The questions have nothing to do with films, and can be inconsequential, such as “what’s your favorite color?” or more contemplative and thought-provoking, such as “what’s your relation to money, poverty, violence, corruption...” The characters of the filmmakers in juxtaposition with the images they have created form a controversial anthropological kaleidoscope.

Constantinos Karatheodori, one of the leading mathematicians of the 20th century, was born in 1873 in Berlin, where his father Stefanos served as a diplomatic employee of the Ottoman Empire. In 1875, the Sublime Porte appointed his father ambassador to Belgium. Young Constantinos grew up and studied in Brussells, in a generous, open and culturally rich familial environment. The Karatheodori family, which traced its origin to Vosnochori, Adrianopol (modern-day Edirne, Turkey), dated back to the mid-1700s and gave the social, political and cultural life of that era great scientists, diplomats, scholars, professors, etc. Karatheodori is well known for his contribution to the founding, by the Venizelos government, of the University of Smyrna in 1920 and for the preparation of a study, in 1930, regarding the re-organization of Greek universities. Among those talking about the life and work of Karatheodori, are his daughter Despina Rodopoulou, the mathematician and his biographer Evangelos Spandagos, the physicist and university professor Chryssoleon Symeonidis and the mathematics student Marina Danezi.