THESSALONIKI FILM FESTIVAL AND HELLENIC FILM ACADEMY CELEBRATE GREEK CINEMA

Stelios is the owner of a jazz club in Athens. A few years ago, through the help of his former associate Vassos, Stelios received a business loan from a Romanian gangster in order to renovate his club. In 2010, the recession finds Stelios on the brink of bankruptcy, unable to repay the loan. The Romanian meets with Stelios and gives him one day to come up with a solution. In a vortex of adultery, drug abuse, violence, guilt and self-deceit, Stelios has a few hours left to save his club, salvage his crumbling marriage, battle the mafia loan-sharks, baptize his employee’s kid and show up at school to pick up his son’s report card as a responsible parent.

After twenty years as a successful TV personality, in an attempt to increase his popularity, well-known presenter Antonis Paraskevas orchestrates his own “kidnapping”. He hides away at an abandoned hotel from where he follows, on the many TV screens, the developments regarding his mysterious disappearance. Deftly juggling the genres of black comedy, drama, stylized dramatization and musical interludes, the director creates a stifling atmosphere of abandonment. As he waits for the right moment to reappear, Antonis Paraskevas is shocked to discover that his name is gradually being forgotten and that life goes on without him. Through the familiar and recognizable images on the screens and the empty, rundown spaces of the hotel, we watch as Antonis Paraskevas and the world that created him go in desperate search of their lost identity.

Gena, the mother of two boys, constantly unemployed and half-crazy, is judged an unfit mother by her own family, and has her baby son adopted by her university professor brother, to be brought up together with his own only-daughter. A tale of cause and effect, inspired by true events, Homeland narrates, through continuous flashbacks, the chain of decisions that propels an incestuous and violent love story.

Michael and Jim, two middle-aged gay friends and ex-lovers, penniless and with HIV, reunite after twenty years. They try to make a living in the post-Katrina New Orleans, making and selling small figures from the Cajun pantheon. They carry past glorious loves as a secret refuge from the present mediocrity and, although they revolt against the hardships of their lives, they depend on each other and stick to their commitment to go on trying to survive together until death do them part. The film was shot in June 2010 in New Orleans.

The leopard shall lie down with the goat. The wolves shall live with the lambs. And the young boy will lead them. 12+1 kids and the carcass of a whale washed ashore.

Following his will to survive while retaining his dignity and keeping his canary alive, the whole time fighting his hunger, 23-year-old Yorgos wanders the streets of Athens. The camera will follow him closely, sensing his power, his despair, his pride, and his essence, but without attempting to explain his actions, his motives or his situation. Besides, there’s no need to. Through its pared down, ascetic style, the film reveals the deepest facets of the hero’s existence, and, along with it, a painfully accurate picture of modern-day Greece, in a heart-rending yet inspiring film, that cannot help but strike a chord in us all.

In the film Walk we meet Marissa and Nina as they are getting ready to take a walk in the town. We watch their daily routine on an ordinary morning, except that this will be the last one Nina spends with her mother.

Isolated and abandoned, surrounded by decaying sport venues, the Athens Olympic Village is today a neardeserted place, its only residents a few working class families who were offered free housing following the 2004 Games. Stuck inside the Village, a group of boys wander around the ruins playing distorted versions of Olympic Games and organizing dog matings for money. The eldest of the gang, Dimitris (17) along with Anna, a retired athlete of 22, will try to escape the confines of the Village for the seaside Β-class resorts in the outskirts of Athens. During their visits and as they penetrate more and more into the lives of the foreign tourists, Dimitris’s longing for acceptance is tested in brutal ways.

She is alone. The world of the living is far away, while the world of the dead smells of chamomile.

The dreams of large steelworks for dirt-cheap scrap, Greece’s environmental obligations to the European Union, and the Western dream of an army of illegal immigrants come together in a string of shanty towns in the shadow of the Acropolis. Which of the three is trodden underfoot? Three Roma from Albania, two Indians, a Turk, one Greek and a boy among them are a mere sample of the endless army of desperados who recycle the metal of an entire nation. The heroes of Raw Material are raw material themselves, huntergatherers in the heart of a modern European capital city. The film documents their toil in the city streets, through the turning of the seasons and the frenetic cyrcles of global economy.

Photophobic Zano, arrives in the big city for the very first time. The year is 1984 and Athens beckons. A vampire and a fine dancer, Zano quickly gets devoured by the dark underbelly of the capital city. All he really wants is a “warm” girl. Strung out and down and out, he ends up at disco Zardoz, a hive of scum and villainy, where he meets Alice, a prostitute, and Peter, a Norwegian drug dealer. Lured into their shady shenanigans, the three of them will traverse mountains and descend into the core of the earth, all the way to the Kingdom of Mathousalas. Norway puts on shiny new shoes, dances the night away with colorful scoundrels and only bites when absolutely necessary.“Norway descends upon the Mediterranean.”