ALBANIAN MELODRAMA

Born in 1961 in a village in Halkidiki, northern Greece, she was forced to leave at the age of four when her family immigrated to Germany. She returned to Greece as a teenager and began dabbling in the arts. Moving to Athens, she graduated from the School of the Popular Experimental Theater and the Veaki School of Drama. Her next stop was Vienna, where she obtained a degree in film direction from the Paritatische Prufungs-Kommision fur Kunst. She began working as a stage actress and then went on to direct for the theater, mainly in Thessaloniki but also in collaboration with the Cyprus Theater organization. In 1995 she began working for ET3 as a director of programs of social content. Her work took her to Sarajevo, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus, the shores of Asia Minor and the Black Sea. Almost all of these documentaries were made thanks to the constant, enthusiastic and inspired collaboration of scriptwriter and production manager Fani Toupalgiki. Her film The Other Side won an honorary mention at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, where many of her documentaries have screened. On the Traces screened at the International Festival of TV Documentaries in Krakow, Poland.