For its 10th anniversary, “Beyond Borders” Kastellorizo International Documentary Festival celebrates with a special edition dedicated to Greece and its creative powers. This year’s festival, which will take place on August 24-30, on the history of Greek documentaries, and their efforts to record reality, comment on it and reshape it in the most imaginative and direct way.

The Festival's visual identity, designed by the creative agency Polkadot Design, draws inspiration from the art of weaving - an art that represents memory, narrative and continuity. Just as the women weavers of 1905, protagonists of the first film recording to be made in the Balkans, wove their present through art, so contemporary documentary filmmakers weave a tapestry of our own reality with images and sound. Greek documentary thus becomes a cinematic loom, where past and present are tightly woven together, creating a narrative canvas that extends into the future.

The festival is organized by the Hellenic History Foundation, in collaboration with Écrans des Mondes, and co-organized by the South Aegean Region with the support of the Hellenic Parliament, the Ministry of National Defense, the General Secretariat for Greeks Abroad and Public Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the General Secretariat of the Aegean and Island Policy of the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Insular Policy, the Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center S.A.-Creative Greece (H.F.A.C.-Creative Greece), the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT), the Greek National Tourism Organization and the embassies of Australia, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Switzerland in Athens. The festival is also supported by renowned global entities such as ZDF, ARTE, BBC, RAI TV, Movies that Matter, IDF Prague, PHOENIX, FIPRESCI, and others.

This year the Festival received a record 907 submissions from 92 countries (600 feature films and featurettes, and 307 shorts). Of the 42 films that have been selected to compete in the festival, 35 are screened in Greek, international and world premieres, while many have been showcased at the world's biggest film festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Karlovy Vary, Amsterdam (IDFA), Copenhagen (CPX DOX), etc.

Beyond Borders will feature three distinct screening sections: the Main Competition, which includes 18 medium and feature-length documentaries; the micro Competition, which includes 24 short documentaries; and the non-competitive Panorama section, which will present daily screenings of thematic tributes and standout films.

This year’s Panorama focuses on a Tribute to Greek Documentary, featuring eight selected works—including films and television episodes by both acclaimed directors and emerging voices; a polyphonic mosaic of Greek documentary production, capturing the genre’s evolution, audacity, and creative renewal.

Awards

The two competitive sections of the festival will present a total of 10 awards:

• Golden (Grand Prix), Silver and Bronze Wreath of Megisti Awards (€7,500, €3,000 and €2,000 respectively), sponsored partially by ERT, will be given to the best documentaries that explore historical events and figures, current sociopolitical issues, and the promotion of human rights in any form or expression.

• The H.F.A.C.-Creative Greece Award will be presented to the best Greek-directed documentary.

• The “Odysseus” Award, initiated and supported the General Secretariat for Greeks Abroad and Public Diplomacy, will honor the best documentary directed by a Greek filmmaker of the diaspora.

• The #THISISEU Award (sponsored by ERT), presented by the European Commission Representation in Greece, will go to the documentary that best promotes contemporary European values.

• The FIPRESCI (sponsored by ERT) will be given to the best film selected by the International Federation of Film Critics.

In the micro Competition Section, which includes 24 short documentaries, the best short documentaries by emerging directors will be presented with the Golden, Silver, and Bronze Phoenix Awards (€1,250, €1,000, and €750 respectively), supported by ZDF/Phoenix TV.

The micro Competition Jury features prominent figures from journalism, literature, and film. Jury President is Michaela Kolster, journalist and Program Director of ZDF/PHOENIX. The jury also includes:

• Bruce Clark, author and long-time contributor to the international press;
• Alex Sakalis, author and journalist;
• Gilles Perrin, professor of French literature and cinema;
• Vasilis Loules, award-winning director in both documentary and fiction.

The FIPRESCI Jury includes film critics Jan Storø, Elli Mastorou, and Nikolaos Alettras.

Learn more about the films that will compete at the 10th Beyond Borders

Special events and initiatives

During the festival, the Critics’ Corner initiative will also take place. Every morning, the three FIPRESCI jury members will engage in open dialogue with professionals and the general public about the films screened the night before in competition. This event celebrates the 100th anniversary of FIPRESCI and will be held as part of the 10th anniversary edition on Friday, August 29.

For the second consecutive year, the successful Co-Production Forum “Meet Your Co-Producer in Kastellorizo” returns. Fifteen senior-level film professionals—directors, screenwriters, producers, and executive producers—will present their work, share case studies of completed films, and mentor at least one documentary project through in-person and online meetings aimed at co-production.

As part of the Panorama section, a special event titled The Future of Documentary will take place on Saturday, August 30, dedicated to the evolving landscape of documentary filmmaking. The award-winning documentary Ending Wars and Making Peace by Jobst Knigge will be screened, followed by a discussion with the director on his creative process.  He will be joined by a panel of directors, academics, producers, and decision-makers will join to explore the present and future of documentary creation, from artistic trends and production ecosystems to audience engagement.

A core part of the festival is the two-day Audiovisual Pitching Lab, where 12 selected projects from around the world are presented online and discussed with leading figures in the film industry. The winning project will receive a free professional color grading package for its final cut.

Emphasizing not only film screenings but also education and career development, the festival has also created a pioneering Film School Network, partnering with top institutions from Southeastern and Central Europe, the Middle East, and South America.

Alongside the main program, Beyond Borders, in collaboration with the Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center S.A.-Creative Greece (H.F.A.C.-Creative Greece), will host a special informative event on the Audiovisual Sector Outreach Program. Aimed at both the general public and industry professionals, this initiative is part of EKKOMED’s new cultural policy tools, designed to strengthen the presence of Greek audiovisual creation both domestically and internationally.

Parallel Cultural Activities

In addition to film screenings and workshops, the festival organizes parallel cultural events, turning Kastellorizo into a global cultural meeting point.

Throughout the screening week and during breaks, musical interludes will be performed by the Athens String Quartet, featuring members of the Athens State Orchestra. During the festival week, documentaries by children for children will be screened as part of a partnership with the Chania Film Festival. The children’s program will also feature workshops, chess classes and acrobatic shows.

The concert “Nocturnal Confessions” will bring together two distinguished Greek soloists: conductor and pianist Miltos Logiadis and composer-accordion virtuoso Christos Zerbinos. The program includes selections from the albums “Spring Equinox” (traditional pieces) and “From the Keys to the Heart,” dedicated to Manos Hadjidakis.

In parallel with the screenings, a sculpture exhibition by visual artist Alexandros Zygouris will be presented, while every day, journalist and author Pavlos Methenitis and academic Matteo Compagnolo will recommend selected books spanning history, literature, and cinema. The Festival will conclude with a concert by Kostas Triantafyllidis.

The post 10th Beyond Borders Kastellorizo International Documentary Festival appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Dimitris Tziovas is Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, where he taught for over thirty five years and supervised many research students. In 2022 he received the Grand Greek State Award for his contribution to scholarship. His book Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity (Bloomsbury 2021) won the European Society of Modern Greek Studies Book Prize. He has served as Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham (2000-2003), on the editorial board of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (1995-2009; 2020-; Reviews Editor 1995-2005) and Journal of Modern Greek Studies (U.S.A 1992-2007). His most recent publication is "Ιστορία, Έθνος και Μυθιστόρημα: Τραύμα, Μνήμη και Μεταφορά" (2024). His research interests involve the study of Greek Modernism in a comparative context; the reception of Greek antiquity and Byzantium; the study of Greek fiction informed by recent developments in critical theory; Greek diaspora and travel writing; nationalism and Greek culture; the Greek language controversy; and the cultural encounters between Greece and the Balkans.

Professor Tziovas spoke to Rethinking Greece* on the duration of Metapolitefsi, the aftermath of the crisis and its impact on the (self)image of Greece, how Greek fiction proposed a critical revisiting of the past, the influence of the Greek diaspora on cultural production, why Greek cinema was successful in conversing with global cultural trends, his proposal for a "hybrid" model of analysis instead of the dualist and ‘pendulum' models that accentuate polarities in Greek modern history, and finally, on the Metapolitefsi period as an era of identities.

Beyond your academic career, you are a public intellectual that often writes on Modern Greek Studies and Greece’s image abroad. In your book “Greece from Junta to Crisis,” you mention that the recent financial crisis led to a reassessment of the Metapolitefsi era and yet another “rediscovery” of Greece from the West. Where do you think we stand on these issues today i.e. the assessment of Metapolitefsi and Greece’s (self)image?

The period following the fall of the military junta in 1974 is known in Greek as Metapolitefsi (meaning regime change), referring both to the transition from dictatorship to democracy and to the ensuing period. Though it has been praised as a period of peace, democratization and improved access to health and education, there is no agreement as to when it ends. Some argue that it ends as early as June 1975, others place its conclusion in 1989 with the end of the Cold War or much later with the economic crisis. In my view, the crisis was both a global and a local event which turned the international spotlight to Greece, judging from the number of articles in the popular press, prime-time television programmes and academic studies on the Greek crisis. Since 1974, no other event in Greece attracted such a global interest. During the crisis a frequent use of stereotypes was made either of those modelled on Zorba depicting Greeks as feckless, lazy or profligate, or the ones based on the contrast between ancient and modern Greece.

The imaginative force of Greek mythology has been repeatedly deployed to describe the trials of the Greek people in images and cartoons or in stereotypical headlines such as ‘Greek tragedy’, ‘Greeks bearing gifts’ and ‘Odyssey without end’. It is interesting to note that the connection between Ancient and Modern Greece is made by westerners only in difficult periods in order to criticize contemporary Greeks as not worthy of their heritage. In short, the Metapolitefsi starts with the euphoria of the restoration of democracy (despite the invasion of Cyprus) and ends with the melancholy of the crisis and an attempt by the country to redefine its (self)image. After the crisis Greece, together with other countries, are entering an era of polycrisis and are facing increasingly new challenges posed by the climate, artificial intelligence, migration, demography and the shortage of energy.

In Greece, literature often explored historical topics—like the Civil War—before historians did, at least until the post-dictatorship period. Does this trend still exist? How has the relationship between history and literature changed in recent decades?

The gradual transformation of Greek fiction since the fall of junta involved the erosion of the national history by highlighting marginalized events and the critical revisiting of the past. Fiction explored aspects of the historical past not touched before or followed the trend in Greek society towards diversity and the creation of space for the inclusion of the Other more closely than poetry did. The themes which have preoccupied fiction writers since the early 1990s can be classified under three broad and overlapping categories: identity and otherness, the historical past and the validity of representation, and cultural metaphors and cosmopolitanism. Novels with a historical theme do not aim to recreate the past but challenge the modalities of historiography and the truth-seeking involvement with the past. Narrativity emerged as the common ground between literature and history while the notion of mnemohistory signifies the impact of memory studies on both fields. It is remarkable the number of novels published on the Greek Civil War and its aftermath, focusing on the role of memory and highlighting the interaction between fiction and archival investigation. The emergence of graphic novels reinvigorated to some extent the historical orientation of Greek fiction which now tends to deal with current biopolitical issues.

You have noted that, during the Metapolitefsi, Greek culture became more outward-looking, with a renewed appreciation for the diaspora’s role. Can you tell us more about how the Greek diaspora’s perspective has influenced cultural production?

Up to 1974 Greece’s image was the one constructed mostly by foreign writers and scholars such as Arnold Toynbee, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durell, Patrick Leigh Fermor or Jacques Lacarrière. Following the fall of the dictatorship Greece gradually attempted a rebranding by promoting its own image and becoming more extrovert. This coincides with a preoccupation with Greekness and the publication in collective volumes of the essays by important literary figures of the 1930s such as George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis and George Theotokas. Since the 1980s the term ‘diaspora’ has been less strongly associated with a traumatic experience and has started to signify something positive in terms of its historical and cultural contribution. Diaspora writers and artists received special attention, and Greek populations were ‘discovered’ in some former socialist countries. Many writers started placing their stories outside Greece and there has been a particular emphasis on border literature. The global aspirations of the Greek nation since the 1990s changed dramatically during the crisis when Greece became once again a country of emigration, this time not of manual workers but of young professionals seeking skilled employment abroad due to the crisis. The earlier touristic image of the country as earthly paradise has been challenged and Greece has been treated as an ideological construct of the West or as a cryptocolony, even though the country has never been strictly speaking a western colony.

The push for Europeanization has made national identity an important topic, shaping Greece’s modern identity in dialogue with Europe. How do you see this relationship evolving in today’s complex political landscape?

Attitudes to Europe are central to the culture of post-junta Greece and reflect its ambivalence, ranging from Euroscepticism to fervent Europeanism. The West started to be associated more with Europe and democracy and not so much with the Cold-war identification with anti-communism. Economic and institutional Europeanization/integration have led to a preoccupation with identity since statements such as ‘Greece belongs to the West’ can be seen as identity statements. The dominance of the term ‘Europeanization’ in the political discourse raises the question as to whether we can talk about the Europeanization of Greek culture in the same way as many analysts talk about institutional or political Europeanization. On the other hand, anti-Europeanism has often been associated with populism and been represented as defying rationalism and modernization but, most importantly, culturally isolationist and unproductive.

In your books, you point out that, during the Metapolitefsi, Greek novels aimed to go beyond national boundaries, and in the past 15 years, Greek cinema has tried to do the same. Have these efforts been successful? How did these two art forms relate to broader European and international artistic trends?

Several recent Greek novels take place (partly or entirely) outside Greece or are written by Greeks residing abroad. They involve travel or migration, and they point to the increasing centrality of space, the growing role of technology and the fluidity of identities. As part of the effort of making Greek culture more extrovert there were attempts to promote Greek literature abroad, but the emphasis is no longer on national literatures but on individual writers or texts as part of a global literary network. Contemporary Greek literature lacked the emblematic figures of Angelopoulos and Lanthimos who made Greek cinema known beyond its national borders. By overcoming the earlier preoccupation with political history, the new cinema of the period of the crisis has become increasingly transnational, performative and biopolitical. The new filmmakers deconstruct the image of Greece as a holiday idyll that had been constructed by earlier films, going one step further in interrogating the notion of national cinema, trying to reach a transnational audience. In this respect, Greek cinema was more successful than Greek literature in gaining wider recognition and conversing with global cultural trends.

One of the most enduring interpretations of modern Greek identity is that of cultural dualism—between a culture of modernization and an underdog mentality. What do you think of this interpretation? Would you suggest an alternative?

Cultural and political dualism, in its various forms, has emerged as the dominant model of analysis for the post-junta period as well as the earlier history of Greece. In the early 1990s the political scientist Nikiforos Diamandouros charted the evolution of two cultures. The older of these two, the underdog culture, has been marked by a pronounced introversion, xenophobia, anti-Westernism and adherence to pre-capitalist practices. This culture competes with its younger counterpart, the modernizing or reformist culture, which has its intellectual roots in the Enlightenment and liberalism. Apart from the dualist pattern there is also the ‘pendulum model’ which sees Greek history and culture as swinging between polarities: archaism/anachronism and modernization (Vassilis Vamvakas), individual and society (Vaggelis Hatzivasileiou), catastrophes and triumphs (Stahis Kalyvas). An alternative method of analysis, based on hybridity, does not highlight polarities or the struggle for the supremacy of modernizing culture but the in-between space which involves the tension and hydridization of competing cultures or opposites. The language reform of 1976 can serve as a case in point here. On the one hand, it could be seen as a victory of modernization and on the other hand as a rehabilitation of the underdog culture and its Romeic strand. It is also interesting to note that some of those who fought for the institutionalization of the demotic language resisted the introduction of the monotonic system in the early 1980s or agonized over the decline of linguistic standards.

You define the Metapolitefsi period as an era of identities, noting that identity issues unite both phases of this period. Can you tell us more about the concept of identity, how it was expressed during the Metapolitefsi era, and how it reflects current global cultural and political developments?

First, I should point out that a classic book Keywords (1976) by the British Marxist intellectual Raymond Williams did not contain an entry on identity which was added in the second posthumous edition (New Keywords, 2005). This suggests that the emphasis on identity is a relatively recent phenomenon, and its rise coincides with the post-junta period. In Greece the prominent role of identity in various forms resulted from the major shift from politics to culture and the disentanglement of group identities from political affiliations. After 1974, Greece opened to the world and renegotiated its position and its image by looking not only towards the West but also eastward and engaging with its forgotten Balkan and Ottoman pasts. The common denominator in the fundamental questions that preoccupied Greeks during the post-junta period (how the nation is defined; who owns the past; and how the past is remembered) is the quest for identity. As a result of the critical engagement with the past and its perceived loss of stability, questions were posed about identity more intensely than ever before. The thematic shift in contemporary Greek cinema away from the grand narratives of political history to concerns about identity, sexuality and family dynamics coincided with similar transitions in social movements. Queer culture gained in visibility, while homosexuality began to be perceived as an identity and no longer just a sexual practice. In conclusion, politics might help to divide the post-junta period into phases, culture and identity draw it together, acting as its overarching metaphors.

*Interview to Ioulia Livaditi

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Nikos Papatakis (1918-2010) was an Ethiopian-born Greek filmmaker, renowned for his subversive and provocative works. Startling, subversive, and explosively controversial, the films of iconoclast Nico Papatakis have long been frustratingly hard to see, but they constitute one of the most radical and neglected bodies of work in all of European cinema. His 1967 film, The Sheperds of Calamity, is renowned director Yorgos Lanthimos' all-time favorite film,

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on July 19, 1918, to a Greek father and an Ethiopean mother, Papatakis spent his early years between Ethiopia and Greece. At 17, he joined Haile Selassie’s army to resist the fascist Italian invasion of Ethiopia. After After the defeat by Benito Mussolini's forces, he was driven into exile, first in Libya and then Greece, before finally settling in Paris in 1939.

In Paris, Papatakis initially worked as an extra in films and eventually owned the famous nightclub La Rose Rouge, a hub for intellectuals and artists. Performers like Juliette Gréco made their debuts there, while luminaries such as André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Boris Vian were regular patrons. During this time, Papatakis befriended Jean Genet, who dedicated his poem "La Galère" to him, “Nico, the Greco-Ethiopian God.” Their friendship was tumultuous, marked by both collaboration and conflict.

In 1950, Papatakis funded and provided the location for Genet's film Un Chant d'Amour, which, due to its explicit content, was banned but later circulated as contraband. After a three-year marriage to the actor Anouk Aimée, with whom he had a daughter, Manuela, Papatakis left for New York, in disgust at France's colonial war in Algeria 1957. There, Papatakis got to know the actor John Cassavetes, and co-produce with him Shadows (1959), Cassavetes first film as director.

While in New York, Papatakis had an affair with the German-born model and singer Christa Päffgen, who took the professional name of Nico from her lover. Papatakis would meet Päffgen near the start of the 1960s, On a lark he asked her if she had ever considered a career as a musician, and so it happened that Papatakis ended up enrolling Nico in her first singing lessons, which eventually led to her performing with the Velvet Underground.

When he returned to Paris after the Algerian War, Papatakis decided to try his own hand at filmmaking, with Les Abysses (1963), an adaptation of Genet’s 1947 play, The Maids. Both The Maids and Les Abysses dramatize the lurid story of the Papin sisters, servants who murdered their employers in the 1930s. Papatakis submitted Les Abysses to the Cannes Film Festival and the selection committee boycotted it, but after Sartre and de Beauvoir lobbied on his behalf the festival eventually screened the film to uproarious scandal.

His subsequent works continued to challenge social and political norms. Papatakis returned to filmmaking a few years later in Greece with Thanos and Despina (1967), also known as Shepherds of Calamity or The Shepherds, a tragic love story set against the backdrop of the Greek military junta. It starred his second wife, Greek actor Olga Karlatos, with whom he was active in campaigning against the regime of the Greek colonels.

Tim Markatos writes for Commonweal magazine: “Shot in striking black and white, Thanos and Despina is clearly a more refined film than Les Abysses in nearly every regard, the manic energy of that freshman film still intact but doled out in smaller doses. Papatakis made the film the same year the Greek military overthrew the government, though you’d be forgiven for assuming this tale of creeping authoritarianism must have been shot after the fact. [...] It is rare to find a movie that engages with Eastern Orthodoxy as directly as Thanos and Despina does, and rarer still to find one set entirely between Holy Saturday and Pascha, the holiest forty-eight hours in the Orthodox liturgical year ” It starred his second wife, Olga Karlatos, with whom he was active in campaigning against the regime of the Greek colonels."

According to four time Academy Award nominated filmmaker Yogos Lanthimos, The Shepherds Of Calamity is “definitely one of the greatest Greek films ever made." Similar to Lanthimos' own work, this classic film takes a simple plot and makes it strange. It tells the story of a poor farmer trying to marry her son to the daughter of a rich land owner, but through director Nico Papatakis’ eye, it becomes something bigger and weirder. “I could have never imagined something so modern, absurd, anarchistic set in a bucolic environment and made in Greece during the ’60s,” Lanthimos said of the movie. “ I’m always taken by surprise when I re-watch it.”

Gloria Mundi (1975), was a disturbing drama starring Olga Karlatos as an actor who plays an Algerian terrorist in a film directed by her husband, but who has to face degradation and torture in reality because of her belief in a revolutionary ideal. It was withdrawn when the extreme right threatened to plant bombs in the cinemas where it was showing, and had to wait until 2005 to be screened publicly again in Paris.

Papatakis' films are noted for their intense, expressionistic style and themes of power, revolution, and social upheaval. His last two films, I Photografia (The Photograph, 1987) and Walking a Tightrope (1992), further explored these motifs: The Photograph, in which an emigrant from the military dictatorship in Greece goes to Paris, was a fairly potent political allegory. According to the critic Yannis Kontaxopoulos, Papatakis's oeuvre "revolves around one single theme: the relations between master and slave, humiliation and revolution, on both a political and personal level". His last film, Walking a Tightrope, dealt with a famous gay writer who tries to make the young Arab boy he loves into the world's greatest tightrope walker. The main character, played by Michel Piccoli, was a thinly disguised version of Genet.

Nikos Papatakis passed away on December 17, 2010, leaving behind a legacy of films with expressionistically heightened style and transgressive themes. His radical and influential cinema that inspired contemporary Greek filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari. Despite his films' initial obscurity - his five films were difficult to track down in English until they were restored in 2018 for a brief theatrical run in New York City - they are now accessible to new audiences, via various streaming platforms, solidifying his place in the pantheon of groundbreaking European directors.

According film critic Tim Maratos, "Papatakis would never enjoy such success in his lifetime, but it was never his intention as a filmmaker to look for it. Despite his proximity to wealth and celebrity, Papatakis’s firsthand experiences of fascism, war, poverty, and exile seem to have kept him from ever turning his desire to unsettle the audience into a brand or a means of securing funding for his next project."

In a featurette shot for the Criterion retrospective on Papatakis, Athina Rachel Tsangari recalls some foreboding advice Papatakis passed down to her at the start of her career: “Don’t try to imitate life. You’re a descendant of Euripides and Aeschylus—it’s all about creating this archetypal violence. Make the audience uncomfortable!”

I.L., with information from the Guardian, Criterion, Commonweal Magazine and Farout Magazine.

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Directed by Thanasis Neofotistos Air Ηostess-737 is a coming-of-age short film, focusing on the consequences of a mother’s symbolic and physical absence in the adult life of the individual. It premiered at the 75th Locarno Festival and since then it has participated in more than 80 international film festivals.

Vanina, perfectly portrayed by Lena Papaligoura, is a 39-year-old flight attendant, who is struggling to handle her emotional turmoil, while on a Boeing-737 flight. She keeps complaining about her new braces but soon, we realize she is dealing not only with physical but also with emotional pain. Her mother’s body is being carried on the plane to be buried in her hometown. This flight seems to be Vanina’s last chance to confront her trauma and finally reconcile with her mother.

Film director, writer and architect Thanasis Neofotistos is a member of the European Film Academy (EFA) and the Greek Film Academy, a Berlinale Talents alumnus & Head Programmer of the Student International Competition at the Drama International Short Film Festival. He has directed two award-winning short films, Patision Avenue and Route-3, and has already started working on his first feature film, The boy with the light blue eyes. 

Thanasis Neofotistos spoke to Greek News Agenda* about Air Ηostess-737 and his future plans.

Airhostess-737 has been very successful so far. It has screened at major international festivals and won several awards.  In your opinion, what has contributed to this outcome?

Its track record is excellent and I'm very happy about that. I can't go into specific factors but I can say with certainty that this is a story I really wanted to tell. It’s a story I ’ve always had in mind and wanted to share. This combination is probably what made it so successful.

How did your collaboration with Lena Papaligoura come about?

Casting is a process difficult to describe. It primarily relies on instinct. Vanina had the form of Lena in my imagination. In the beginning, we did audition a few actresses but eventually went for our first, intuitive choice that was absolutely rewarding. Apart from her exceptional talent, Lena has something of Vanina’s comic side, which was very comforting. At the same time, she has a kind of craziness, both as an actress and as a person, which I think is what took the role to another level. Last but not least, she is a fun person to work with.

The film focuses on the mother-daughter relationship.  How did you decide to deal with such a complex issue?

It all started with a dream, where I was in Vanina's shoes. Throughout our lives, I don't think we ever stop dealing with these early, fundamental relationships. We go around and around, we reproduce them, sometimes going in circles and sometimes moving forward. In a way, Vanina offered me a chance to creatively process my relationship with my own mother.

What is your view on acceptance in general? Does its pursuit delay or, even worse, nullify reconciliation with oneself? Is it maybe overrated?

In my opinion, it is not overrated at all. Acceptance is a necessary condition for reconciliation with ourselves. For those who weren't lucky enough to get it when and from those who should have offered it, the only way is to go back there, dig in, and claim it, even if the subject is missing. That's exactly what Vanina does.

Vanina is struggling to look flawless in her professional life. Most of us experience, in one way or another, similar stressful situations. Do you think there is a way we can have a balanced personal and professional life?

I think that we live in extremely demanding, exhausting times. Coupled with exposure to social media, which demands constant connectivity with everyone, striking a balance can be very difficult. It takes a conscious and concerted effort to make it work.

Are you optimistic about the future of Greek cinema, both in Greece and abroad?

Yes indeed! Greek cinema is doing extremely well abroad now and I think that in the next few years we can expect to see works from very talented filmmakers who will play a leading role. I hope these works will also meet a little more of the audience in the cinema. For me, that's the challenge.

How about your next steps?

I'm currently fully committed to my first feature film The Boy with Blue Eyes, which will be shot in the next few months after almost 8 years of work. It is the coming-of-age story of Peter, a teenage boy, in a strange, mountainous village in Greece full of fear and superstition! I am so excited and very nervous at the same time!

*Interview by Dora Trogadi

Read also via Greek News Agenda: Spiros Jacovides on his movie "Black Stone"; Asimina Proedrou on her film "Behind the Haystacks"

The post Thanasis Neofotistos on his film “Air Ηostess-737” appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Directed by Spiros Jacovides, Black Stone is a movie focusing on Greek society with extraordinary sensitivity. Masterfully using the form of pseudo-documentary, Jacovides comes up with a story that encapsulates defining aspects of Greek realities.

Striking a balance between comedy and drama, Black Stone dives into Greek reality, exploring its complex and dysfunctional aspects in an insightful manner. Humor and hope are among the key elements of the movie aimed to capture the dominant role of family in an ever-changing Greek society.

Based on an imaginative script, solid characters, and excellent performances, the movie has participated in more than 30 film festivals in Greece and around the world, 63^rd Thessaloniki Film Festival, 34^th Trieste Film Festival, 39^th Alexandria Mediterranean Countries Film Festival, 17^th Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, 8^th Berlin Greek Film Festival and New York Film Expo to name a few. To date, it has won 23 awards, more than 10 of which are audience awards.

Spiros Jacovides was born in London and studied Directing at the London College of Printing and the Stavrakos School. In 1998 he was a guest student at the Berlin Film Academy (DFFB). He lives and works in Athens writing and directing commercials, documentaries and video clips. He has written and directed three short films. Black Stone is his first feature film.

The director spoke to Greek News Agenda* about the creative process of his award-winning film, his meticulously crafted characters brought to life by compelling performances from the film’s cast, as well as the future of Greek cinema.

Black Stone focuses on the pathologies of Greek society. How did you manage to raise such important issues in a humorous way? Would you consider yourself an optimist?

There was a great deal of risk and many traps along the way. We wanted to tell a tragic story with tragic heroes combining drama and humor. I believe that it is possible to talk about the most tragic things in a humorous way without them losing their importance. Humor makes them even more accessible to the viewer, humor makes life more accessible in general.

The challenge was to balance drama and humor. I think we did well in this respect. Another great challenge was to adjust our story to Greek society and to touch upon different themes of Greek reality while focusing on the story and its characters.

The problem is that the Greek reality is so complex, so dense and so rich that you don't really know where to start.  At the same time, the Greek audience is familiar with it, so you have to be very careful in order to portray it in a convincing way.

Generally speaking, I am an optimistic person. This is the reason why I picked a hopeful ending for this very tragic story. I believe in good, in hope. I believe that there is no evil without good no matter what happens in our lives.

How would you define Black Stone in terms of genre? 

I would define it as a tragicomic mockumentary or pseudo-documentary since it gives you the impression of realism and verisimilitude. The viewer knows that he is not watching an actual documentary. Nevertheless, he is drawn to the story and he subtly accepts the illusion that he is watching a true story.

The protagonists are talking directly to the camera, which essentially means directly to the viewer. This genre also gives the director a great deal of freedom of movement while focusing on the actors’ performances.

The Greek mother figure is dominant in Black Stone. Do you think that modern Greek women relate to this kind of relationship of codependency and oppression? Do you think that Greek society is conservative when it comes to family?

The Greek mother was the main reason for me to tell this story. Her footprint is huge in Greek society. She has managed to survive in an extremely patriarchal and conservative society, living through others; her children, her husband, her parents; never fulfilling her own desires, needs, dreams and ambitions.

She is a woman who never discovers her true identity. In fact, she never takes her life in her own hands. I am mostly referring to the women of previous generations. Fortunately, things are gradually changing, slowly but in a solid way. Nowadays, a woman can be a mother and, at the same time, in search of her own identity. However, the influence of previous generations persists and still haunts us to a great extent. The pathologies continue to be passed on from one generation to the next but society is changing and the world keeps moving forward. Conditions today are very different, there is hope.

The character portrayed so delightfully by rapper Negros tou Moria (Kevin Zans Ansong) is a figure we see for the first time in Greek cinema. A child of immigrants, born in Greece, Michalis feels that he is still not being equally accepted. Do you think that these stereotypes have changed in Greece? I was thinking about how crucial the role of the arts is in enhancing the visibility of individuals or groups that society simply chooses to ignore.

The character of Michalis played by Negros tou Moria is indeed a character that we don't often see in Greek cinema perhaps because he belongs to a new generation, he is a new addition to Greek society and societies need some time to adapt and accept new facts.

I believe that Greeks are deeply xenophobic but not racist whatsoever.  They do not historically carry the ideology of racism as Americans, English, Austrians, etc. However, they are historically insecure concerning external factors and phobic. They hang on to what they have acquired so far. As a result, they are afraid of the "unknown" and feel threatened by it.

Although both of these conditions, xenophobia and racism, may ultimately lead to the same negative outcome, I think it is important to make this distinction because I believe that it is easier to overcome a strong phobia than to change a deeply rooted mindset.

I absolutely agree with you about the crucial role that the arts, and especially cinema, can play, not only in terms of visibility, which is very important, but also in terms of empathy, i.e. being able through films to enter into the microcosms of the characters and the tragic situations they experience and to emotionally perceive the big problems in their complexity and not to stay on the surface which unfortunately leads to oversimplification and apathy.

The casting of the movie was brilliant.  How did these collaborations come about?

For me, casting is one of the important and favorite parts. I work very much with my instincts in the final selection of actors.

I may choose an actor even if I know nothing about his work just by seeing some photos of him or after having coffee with him. Over the years, I’ve learned to trust my instincts. I think an important part of directing is learning to listen and trust your instincts. I also pay attention to every single role, big or small, even the extras because in a film you are making a world, a whole universe so everything is equally important, from the biggest element to the smallest detail.

The characters of the film were in my mind right from the beginning. I worked very hard on the script but also during the editing process. The characters never stopped evolving and that's one of the magic parts of the process of a film; the continuous, unstoppable and unpredictable creative process.

From shooting to editing, the film took 10 months to complete but the total process took seven whole years! Making a feature film in Greece can be hard and unfortunately, few make it to the end. There is always a high degree of uncertainty and the process is sometimes in vain. It takes tremendous faith, perseverance and patience and that is why I have great admiration and compassion for all my colleagues.

One of the reasons so many related to your film certainly has to do that characters are so recognizable and authentic. Does the new generation of Greek filmmakers focus on Greek society? Do you think that contemporary Greek cinema has the place it deserves in Greece and abroad?

Yes, I believe a new generation is focusing on modern Greek society, reality, and soul, especially on the Greek family. For decades, I think many of us felt that many films were made that we could not relate to. This changed with Giannaris, Tsitos, Economides, and Lanthimos.  These films focused on new themes the Greek audience could relate to but also managed to go beyond the borders and excel abroad, thus finally achieving an outward-looking orientation in Greek cinema.

Personally, I will never forget the day I saw Yannis Economides' Spirtokouto. For me, it was a revolution, as if an era died and a new one was born. It gave me tremendous strength and energy for the future.

*Interview by Dora Trogadi

Read also via Greek News Agenda: Filming Greece | Asimina Proedrou on her film “Behind the Haystacks”

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