Festival films

When Leon’s best friend Aris shares tragic news about his battle with cancer, unemployed and desperate to help, Leon secretly decides to become a criminal to pay for more cancer treatments. Against the backdrop of modern-day Athens, Leon’s actions to save his best friend have irreversible consequences.

A circle of friends reunite for a weekend away to celebrate the same-sex wedding of a member of their group. Yet despite their best efforts to behave themselves, a series of surprise plans, unexpected arrivals and exposed secrets lead to an explosion of drama that, coupled with the flammable combination of hurt feelings, unresolved tensions, and lots of wine cannot be contained.

PAOK F.C. (the Pan-Thessalonikian Sports Club of Constantinopolitans) was founded in 1926, in order to meet the deeper and hitherto unfulfilled need for the integration of the repressed refugees into a hospitable place. PAOK represents the roots for the uprooted people, a compass towards the lost homeland, the living memory that maintains its historicity within the reality of the present and the prospect of its future. 90 Years PAOK: Nostalgia for the Future is not a simple recording of the history of the football team but a live film diary of the club’s milestones, in conjunction with its historical progress and social development. This is a journey through time and space, a cinematic treatise about a club that represents an Idea. “Because PAOK is not just an sports club. Our fans say that the team is an Idea. Indeed, it represents the nostos (i.e. homeward journey) of the refugee as well as the rights of the lower classes and the repressed.” In the five months of shooting this film, Nikolas Triandafyllidis visited the core places where the heart of the club beats, to film the touching confessions of veterans and youngsters, coaches, current PAOK players and loyal fans, who have and always will honor the club’s colours and its sacred “heavy” jersey. The film, a peculiar time machine that travels from Toumba Stadium to the PAOK Fan Club in Dusseldorf, to Istanbul and Lisbon, meets the heroes of the past and the protagonists of the present. From glorious years to difficult times and back to the present, the movie captures a club’s history that is being continuously written on the stands, on the field and on the road, at big encounters against major rivals, but primarily with itself. This is the story of a club infused with passion and a strong commitment to the motto that Pablo Garcia introduced to the world of PAOK: “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

Gene (James Brolin) gets up day after day and follows the same monotonous routine that he has lived since the death of his wife ten years earlier. He is aging fast from illness and loneliness and has given up on the future. Today, however, he awakens with a new determination to end the life he has known. Today, there is a new resolve that will change the course of everything.

What does a garment, a uniform or a naked body signify? And if you take off your clothes do you strip off your ideological or social identity, your true self? In this ironic, piercing satire, a housemaid, working in an exclusive gated community in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, embarks on a journey of sexual and mental liberation in a nudist swinger-club boarding the high security walls.

The most colorful, imaginative, pop film on the (re)construction of reality and historical memory comes from Iran. A detective is being interrogated for a case he handled 50 years ago. On 23 January 1965, one day after the murder of the Iranian prime minister, a political prisoner was found hanged inside a half-built ship in the middle of a desert island, next to a cemetery. Legend had it that earthquakes occurred whenever someone was buried, so the detective got to work, accompanied by a sound engineer and a geologist. What is left of this research when the file re-opens? Memories from the past arrive in the present as fast as an orange Chevrolet that crosses the desert...

A 3D requiem to Form, Feminine- Goddess, eternal Eve, Art. From idealization and sacred worship to delectation and insemination, to transformation and reproduction, to deterioration and decay, to desecration and vandalizing, to condemnation and subjugation, to the fall into timeless erebus. To the dream of regeneration.

It’s summertime in Athens and Nikos, a 30-year-old broke musician, is taking care of a luxurious villa in the suburbs that belongs to a friend. Between poolside cocktails and fooling around with the dog that he is meant to be taking care of, Nikos has a plan. Still unable to get over his recent break-up with Sofia, he figures this is a unique opportunity to get some answers and he invites her over for the weekend. Sofia happily accepts, not knowing that Nikos’s plans are not as innocent as they seem. Nikos locks himself up in the house with Sofia and refuses to let her leave until she provides some rationale for the break-up, turning their supposed carefree holiday into a mess of games, fights, laughs and introspection. Afterlov is a funny, poignant and scathing post-love story between two people who refuse to grow up.

On the 29th of November, a young man murders and dismembers his lover. The head, torso and limbs are found in various dumpsters in Vienna. The motive for the crime is still unclear. In his feature-film debut, David Clay Diaz draws inspiration from real-life stories, turns to the incomprehensible and dives into the emotional universe of two very different young men. Fragments of a hopeless chronology.

Milena is a middle-aged wife and mother ensconced comfortably behind a gate in an upscale suburb of Belgrade. She quietly tends to her looks, dutifully cooks and entertains, and meets her friends for choir practice. She makes love with her husband and they socialize jauntily with a group of old friends. But unsettling realities are beginning to seep into Milena’s consciousness and disrupt her ordered world. One day while cleaning, she happens upon a videotape that incriminates her husband in horrific war crimes. A Good Wife is the story of how this secret reverberates in Milena’s life and eventually changes her..

Based on true events, this atypical “period film” tells a story that resonates disturbingly with present times. April 1942. The war seems far away in the small Swiss town of Payerne. Yet the local economy is weak and people are malcontent. The cafes are full of sinister characters. Garage owner Fernand Ischi and his men have sworn fealty to the Nazi Party. They dream of catching Adolf Hitler’s attention. On April 16, the next local cattle fair will take place and Arthur Bloch, a livestock dealer, will attend. That is the day a Jew will be killed as an example.

The story takes place in a country about which we know nothing: a country of snow and dense forests, somewhere in the North. A family lives in an isolated house near a lake. Alexi, the brother, is a young man with a pure heart. A woodcutter. An ecstatic, prey to epileptic fits, he is entirely open to the nature that surrounds him. Alexi is terribly close to his younger sister, Hege. Their blind mother, their father, and their little brother are the silent witnesses to their overwhelming love. A stranger arrives, a young man barely older than Alexi...

A childless middle-class couple prepares a photo album of a fake pregnancy period – at the beach, at work, lounging at home. This way, their adopted child will eventually be able to recognize them as its loving biological parents. And of course, they’ll have real documentation to share with friends and co-workers. The proud couple goes all the way with the family history facade by staging snapshots in the hospital with their adopted baby boy. The earnest couple’s next step is to start a new life with their new baby. But the couple panics when they discover that the adoption has been registered in police records, only one step away from public knowledge.

This is a story about the birth of western civilization. Alcibiades as a historical figure gathered all the positive qualities that are incorporated in the evolution of western civilization. He has been loved and hated by all major forces of his time including Athens, Sparta and Persia. Alcibiades was a true Renaissance figure that symbolized vigor, beauty, philosophy and art. His life is a living example of Greece itself, since it embodies all the qualities which were inherent in the birth of the western mentality. The script examines thoroughly his relationship with another giant of ancient Greece, namely Socrates. Their communication and the influence that both excreted on one another are presented in the film in a way that enlightens the audience about the personality of the great philosopher.

Alice is drinking a cup of coffee and reading. Vasilis wants to meet her in the evening. Katerina waits for him every night. Vasilis wants to run away from all these things.

Two men share a shelter together, a place they inhabit not out of a need to escape, but out of a desire to imagine a new order of things. Boban and Boris live within a set of almost identical abandoned bungalows, in the midst of stray donkeys, plastic bottles and red berry bushes, reed beds, tall trees and transient workers. Someone else enters this secluded space and its patterns are disturbed. The world outside arrives and brings stories of other times, of cities to the north and south, of how things are made. Waiting for Godot meets the aesthetics of socialist realism, in a formed modernist utopia on the borders of time and of Balkan geography.

A “mystery film” exploring the uncanny that exists beside or inside us throughout our existence. Aloys, a middle aged private detective is about to see his life change drastically. He experiences life from a safe distance, through a video camera he leaves on, 24 hours a day, and the massive collection of surveillance tapes he organizes and obsessively watches at home. After a night of heavy drinking, following the death of his father, he wakes up on a bus to find that his tapes have been stolen. Soon after, a mysterious woman calls and offers to return the tapes if he will try an obscure Japanese invention called “telephone walking.” As he is drawn in deeper and deeper, falling in love with the voice on the other end of the phone, the woman opens up a new universe.

America Square is a Square in Athens. It’s the Casablanca of our times. A triptych revealing the opposing forces of today’s humanitarian challenges. Two friends, Billy, a tattoo artist, and Nakos, a «banal» Greek racist, come head to head in America Square in Athens because of the survival journey of Tarek, a Syrian refugee. in Athens because of the survival journey of Tarek, a Syrian refugee.

What is the biggest danger Europe faces: the crisis on its borders, or its own paranoia and fear? Driving to work, our protagonist passes by the refugee tent city in the park. She means them no harm; they mean her no harm. So why then, when their paths intersect, do things go catastrophically wrong?

A desolate city of the former Soviet Block becomes the setting of this allegory about a modern Orpheus, who can sacrifice everything in the name of desire. Seymour is a young American actor, adrift in a city corroded by nightmare and corruption, disease and hunger, a place of savage dogs and pornography and bodies – the very young and the almost dead – and a beautiful prostitute. Helpless, obsessed, Seymour pursues her into a perverse and violent erotic underworld, driven by unbearable longing through sickness and madness towards death.

Leonardo Favio’s last film is a remake of one of his early works, El Romance del Aniceto y la Francisca, in the form of a musical. We meet again Aniceto, the solitary man who lives with his rooster; Francisca, the decent, humble girl who is in love with him; and Lucia, the enigmatic and irresistible neighbor who will lead him to ruin. The classic story of a love triangle is embellished with ballet and tango scenes, while the main theme song was written by Leonardo Fabio’s son, Nico.