Discoveries from Greece World Cinema

Every year, in July, the Pelion Festival gathers students and high-profile teachers of classical music from all over the world. Seminars are organized and concerts are given in one of Greece’s most picturesque landscapes: Mount Pelion and Zagora village. This invaluable event is run thanks to the devotion of a five-member family, without any financial support whatsoever from the official state. This is a film featuring skillful musicians, plenty of food and lots of cellos!

In July 2018, a fire broke out around the villages of Mati and Neos Voutzas, in Attica, Greece. People lost their lives. What remains are memories of sounds and sights of a black land.

A collection of both old and recent memories about a place I love, merged together into a 7-minute short film, the first one of the series.

A girl sleeps beside a spring. When the water stops, a glowing sphere appears and shifts the balance of the world. What follows feels like a dream, or something that keeps happening over and over.

Marina, after a nervous breakdown, comes face-to-face with herself and explores all the things she could have become. The short film is the second part of "House at the End of the World".

The film ‘Pali Edo’ is a portrait of the wetland of Vourkari Megara. Vourkari is an important wetland with over 130 species of birds and other species recorded in the heart of an industrial area. Everyday moments of people living or working in this place make up the image of the wetland. What is it that drives someone to arrive at a place, to stay or to return?

Sofia panics during the planning of her wedding. A jumble of thoughts and images triggers an anxiety that Sofia struggles against and trying to overcome.

MAZOHA, a lonely artist, shares thoughts and moments from his everyday life to show us that this is the way to achieve your dreams. What is this way? By always chasing them, dedicated to what you are truly pursuing. To express yourself.

Two sisters go to their summer home after their mother's death. The "tranquility" of their lives will be disturbed by a group of young people with their caravan and a researcher's account of the creation of the petrified forest.

Yorgos Panousopoulos talks about cinema, love, his childhood years and death in a narrative that juxtaposes his words with pieces of his work up to 1990.

In the twilight of a post-apocalyptic age, an intergalactic traveller seeks the sacred language of birds on the last remaining planet. With an artificial mind as her companion, she will learn that even in the stillness of silence, the desire to communicate endures, unyielding and eternal.

A man's dark actions kickstart a series of mysterious events that threaten to destroy his entire life.

Greek comedy

Alex and her friends go on a trip away from Athens. Soon, she realises that this decision is bringing her closer to everything she hoped to escape from.

People meet. People go. People remember.

After a date with Anna and through a eccentric presence, a young man, Victoras, learns about Vicky's curse. What is Vicky's Curse?

A Greek man joins the Resistance against the German occupiers, but his fiancée believes he has abandoned her for another woman.

Mourning and love come together in a heartbreaking and profound experience that the protagonist goes through.

When Amy's boyfriend has gone missing, Nick, a young detective is the one to search for him.

The documentary brings us into contact with the story of Christos Sakellaris, a Greek immigrant to New York at the beginning of the 20th century and the one and only journey he made back to his homeland.

In the last years of their lives, the poet Nanos Valaoritis and the painter Marie Wilson lived together in an apartment in downtown Athens. Nanos Valaoritis is reflected in the cinematographic lens, weaving personal memory into space and time. A personal microcosm, containing multifaceted manifestations of a creative life.

The timeline of a fire that broke out on August 19, 2023, and 17 days later became the largest wildfire in Europe in recent years, leaving behind 935,000 hectares of burnt land. The account of the fire was recorded through aerial images, to achieve the best possible visualization.

Nowhere is a work about the physical space of the theatrical stage. Constantly changing and defined by the men and women that inhabit it, it can be countless different places while designed to be nowhere at all.

As the economic crisis deepens, interventions in journalistic work are increasing and journalists are being asked to choose whether to follow a central line or whether to dare to take a different stance. Those who dare risk not only being fired or prosecuted, but even their physical integrity. Oppression presents just a few of the hundreds of incidents that show that one of the victims of the crisis in Greece is the free press.

The Statue of Liberty and the Joker, two wandering street artists, end up prisoners in the same cell. When the state’s systemic attrocity breaks Liberty, the Joker will search for her pieces, to put her back together.

Two friends on a beach. Can thoughts become words? How can a white tub help?

Andreas is an unknown actor, who has ridden the rod and believes that he was born to play only Shakespeare and culture. He has a bond with Zeta, who is a comedy star, and managed to get him a small part in a project, which she will star in. In other words, let Andreas dress up as a woman and make a college girl. But he does not agree... The couple has a close friend, Alexis, a young lawyer, who has come up with an original trick to extract money every now and then from a rich aunt who lives in Africa. Sometimes he writes to her that he just got married and he needs money to open a house, sometimes that his non-existent wife gave birth to a baby and other similar tales...

Synthetiki was founded in 1985 in Athens by Apostolis Loverdos and Dionisis Avgerinos. The music documentary A Film about Something highlights the late recognition that this electronic band through the web, while recording moments from their concerts and jouney as a band. Apostolis refers to this early period as a “perfect rejection toward us.”

“If we fish now from Dardanelles to Piraeus, the fish we will catch will be two, the barrels ten, the bottles a hundred, and the garbage a thousand!.” Last year, Dimitris from Kavala, with his trawler, retrieved from the sea 2.5 tons of litter. He is one of the 40 fishermen who collaborate with the Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation.

In a fictional society, a county forbids citizens from stepping on the lines from the tiles on the sidewalk.

Sunday afternoon. The best time to install the new automatic home security system. All I need is my magnifying glass so I can read the manual. But where the hell have I put him?

A deadly virus has forced humanity into its four walls, but life must go on. The answer to this problem is our dummies, mechanical effigies that allow us to live through them. But the solution, although it was once described as temporary, seems more permanent than ever. The film was made in the context of the 5th Panorama Film School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with the theme DEACTIVATION.

Erechtheion and Time directed by A. Drakopoulou. Produced by Acropolis Restoration Service in 2001.

Stavros is trying to connect with his environment and himself.

A young girl, Sandy, is locked in her house in the city center and is desperately looking for intercourse. The handsome boy on the opposite balcony is the ideal protagonist of her romantic fantasies. When the neighbor does not show up for the date, Sandy sinks into grief. The misunderstanding is soon resolved and Sandy goes for a walk with the boy, but the date does not turn out as she imagined.

Lost in the thick fog of a freezing night, about ten followers of Satan, delirious with ecstasy, glorify Ahriman. The Witch completes the macabre ritual, sacrificing a sixteen-year-old girl to the Lord of Darkness and invites him to come to their Sabbath party. The Goat of Mendes inexplicably and mysteriously appears among them and the Satanists, in a state of frenzied paranoia, surrender to a delirium of insanity. Suddenly, the Holy Inquisitor, accompanied by a group of soldiers, interrupts the satanic ritual, arrests the Witch and tortures her until she confesses that she is a heretic and a follower of Satan.

One snowy night two friends who were “troublemakers”, get close to trouble as they end up looking for food at Barba Kostas’ house. On this cold and lonely winter, Barba Kostas is really unhappy and completely devoid of Christmas mood…

Athens 2020 - Holy Saturday - Somewhere in Kipseli. A trans woman is forced to live confined and isolated in a haunted apartment following a government order for mandatory quarantine. The night before Easter Sunday, the televised speech of a scientist about the pandemic will cause her final battle with the ghosts of the past.

After the liberation of Athens from German occupation in 1944, a new era followed in Greece. Conflicts broke out between those who had fought against the Germans and those who had collaborated with them and the British Army. After the military defeat of the former, the signing of the Treaty of Varkiza signaled the start of the White Terror. Houses were set on fire, people were raped, beaten, murdered, imprisoned, and exiled. All this drove the persecuted men and women to take to the mountains, where they would form the cornerstone of the Democratic Army of Greece. In this documentary, the women fighters of the Democratic Army tell their stories. Women who were persecuted, women who consciously chose to fight, women who were conscripted to the cause, together they constitute the mosaic of experience of a civil war.

A young couple, a boy and a girl, meet on the edge of a cliff for their last date. They spend the whole night together, drinking, smoking and talking about their lives and their future; until the dawn comes.

During a general lockdown because of the pandemic, an unemployed actor is working at an online companionship service when a lonely middle-age gay man calls him seeking redemption.

The history of the ancient neighborhood of Colonus in Athens, by a novelist and script writer who lives in modern-day Kolonos.

In the midst of the economic crisis, a persistent researcher delves into the eventful life and the unexplored work of preeminent Greek modernist poet, Nikos Karouzos. Through photos, archives, super 8s, videotapes and memories, he travels back in time accompanying the poet from the traumatic postwar history of Greece to the Academy of Stockholm and all the way to the 1921 rebellion of Kronstadt in order to find a lost film footage.

Sixteen-year-old Jacob wants to save his mother, Helen, from the claws of his father, Emmanuel, who is an alcoholic and a gambler, and who systematically abuses her. Our story begins the evening of the great escape when Jacob manages to put in motion a carefully designed plan for their exit from the paternal home. The evening before their escape, Jacob has an important dream, that gives him courage and motivates him to act. In this dream, the comic that Jacob designs in his spare time, called 'The Noir Project', comes alive, and the characters, which reflect the morbid reality in which he lives, predict, in a strange way, the events that will follow that night...

A short film about a french tourist that discovers a side of the city of Athens that is not described in the tourist guides. Best short film for the 3rd Thessaloniki Film Festival. Directed by Kollatos Dimitris, 1962, 11'.

Fani, who grew up facing many difficulties on an island in the Ionian Sea, undertakes a dangerous mission: to deliver a package containing highly confidential documents to the home of lawyer Pagoulatos. However, the mission has been compromised, and Fanis is forced to hide the documents because his life is in danger. Shortly afterwards, a girl named Anthi arrives on the island, who is somehow involved in the story of the secret documents. When she meets Fanis, she feels an irresistible attraction to him. They both discover that they are in love. Fanis, at Anthi's urging, comes to Athens... His relationship with Anthi goes through many ups and downs... At some point, he realizes that his life is in danger with every step he takes. The reason is the documents he continues to keep hidden... His love for Anthi slowly turns into a nightmare.

A rapper tries every possible way to communicate with his dead mother and encounters immortal characters.

After her mother passed away, Leny (82) finally had time to follow her dream of cycling around the world. She didn’t get further than New Zealand where she met the love of her life - another woman. Leny came out of the closet aged 68. Since then she has thrown herself into lesbian life, making up for lost time. She is an inspiration to many, but is not getting any younger. She is determined to make the most of her remaining years.

A documentary with outtakes from early greek films like Maria Pentagiotissa (1927), Astero (1929), Promithefs desmotis (1930), Dafnis kai Hloi (1931) & O magos tis Athinas (1931).

A violent man in the highlands of the Greek province traffics emigrants and young hookers from the Balkan countries. The man doesn't dare to prostitute his teenage daughter, Fanny. Fanny, addicted to drugs now and mentally quite invalid, does not resist to the violence of her father and works for him as a prostitute.

A patient-artist lies in a hospital bed, gradually surrounded by the objects of his “work therapy.” With the help of his assistants and family members, he toils to create his greatest masterpiece: his own death.

The centre of Athens. Surrounded by a world in crisis and generalised destruction, a small group of characters resist the end towards which they seem inevitably to be heading. The film looks at fraternity and the desire not to throw in the towel.