A big-city cinephile banquet with a refreshingly relaxed late-night timetable, the 63rd Thessaloniki International Film Festival returned with packed cinemas and even more packed parties last week following its muted, Covid-aware comeback a year ago. Even as the cool November evenings drew in, the city’s outdoor pavement cafes, grungy bars and ocean boardwalks were still heaving with revellers long past midnight. After a cautious few years, My Big Fat Greek Film Festival felt like it was back in full Dionysian mode.
A giant horseback statue of local hero Alexander The Great towers over Thessaloniki’s bustling central waterfront area. The impact of this all-powerful emperor, and unlikely Colin Farrell lookalike, endures even today at the film festival, where the main prizes are named after him. This year, the Golden and Silver Alexander winners in the international sections included Valentina Maurel’s sensual coming-of-age drama I Have Electric Dreams, Ali Chebbi’s powerfully strange political allegory The Dam, and Marina Er Gorbach’s Klondike, a devastating portrait of life in occupied eastern Ukraine. All high-calibre choices, even if they all arrived in Greece already heavily garlanded with festival prizes and awards season buzz. Indeed, Martijn de Jong’s Narcosis, a beautifully crafted semi-ghost story abut grief and loss which earned a Special Jury Mention in Thessaloniki, was recently confirmed as the official Dutch submission to the Academy Awards.
Elsewhere in the homegrown program of world premieres, Greek cinema appeared to be in a healthy and eclectic slate. One of the festival’s two most feted domestic prize-winners was Asimina Proedrou’s Behind The Haystacks, a brooding family tragedy of almost Shakespearean dimensions set against the backdrop of illegal immigration between northern Greece and neighboring North Macedonia. The other, Black Stone, touched on similarly dark themes in a diametrically opposite style. From director Spiros Jacovides, this genial mockumentary comedy is a warm-hearted celebration of motherhood, migration and multiculturalism. Both films are doubly impressive for being fully realised, confidently assembled debut features.
One of the keynote panel discussions in Thessaloniki was a critical enquiry into whatever happened to the Greek Weird Wave, that darkly surreal movement spearheaded by directors like Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari in the late Noughties. But there was concrete proof of its lasting influence, both good and bad, in Bastards, a self-indulgent orgy of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll jointly devised by director Nikos Pastras and his cast of horny young drama students. By turns tiresome and thrilling, provocative and pornographic, this prize-winning experimental drama was far less shocking than it wanted to be. But it partially redeemed itself with its bravado bloodbath finale, which felt like Lanthimos on a Tarantino budget.
More than most film festivals, Thessaloniki often feels like an interconnected multi-media arts event. As curated by general director Elise Jalladeau and director Orestis Andreadakis, the schedule this year included spin-off music performances, bespoke books and visual art exhibitions, all designed to mirror and complement the screening program. This year also marked the tenth anniversary of the passing of one of Greek cinema’s most feted auteurs, Theo Angelopoulos, who died in a freak traffic accident early in the shooting of his film The Other Sea. Thessaloniki festival honoured his memory with an exhibition of large-format still photos from the film, which felt like teasing fragments of an unfinished symphony.
A glorious old-world cinema with an opulent burgundy interior, the city’s Olympion theatre also hosted a rare public screening of Angelopoulos’s debut feature, Reconstruction (1970), a noir-ish non-linear murder story elegantly clothed in crisp, timeless monochrome. In addition, one of the handsomely refurbished dockside warehouses that forms the festival’s main activity hub provided gallery space for a wide-ranging exhibition of visual artworks responding to the themes of Reconstruction half a century later through a broad, imaginative, contemporary lens. Even if the connections often felt tenuous, the notion of a living dialogue between a 52-year-old film and an ensemble of 21st century artists felt like an inspired way to keep an antique cinematic canon alive, adding multiple voices to that of a single auteur, almost like a modern-day version of a classic Greek chorus.
