Despatches from Thessaloniki International Film Festival 2022
This year’s Thessaloniki found fresh roots in Greek filmmaking and tied together a global tradition of indigenous cinema.
In between its starry opening and closing films – Steven Spielberg’s childhood drama The Fabelmans and Marie Kreutzer’s royal biopic Corsage – this year’s Thessaloniki International Film Festival saw a notable shift towards addressing social issues. Climate action was a major theme, capitalising on last June’s success of Evia Film Project, the festival’s initiative to help with the cultural regeneration of the Greek island of Evia following the devastating wildfires of 2021.
Also prominent was a tribute to indigenous cinema, including several works by indigenous directors from around the globe and in languages that are rapidly becoming extinct. One highlight was a screening for Raúl Alberto Tosso’s 1986 film Gerónima, which follows a female Mapuche hero who has a breakdown in her mental health in the hospital where she and her children are stationed, having been uprooted from their home in Patagonia’s icy plains. Tosso’s powerful film reconstructs her story using audio recordings made between Gerónima and her physician in 1976.
Responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mantas Kvedaravičius’s hair-raising documentary Mariupolis 2 was presented as a special screening. Back in 2015 Kvedaravičius had visited Mariupol to film a nation trying to maintain its industry and cultural life while under threat from bombing. All of this has vanished in Mariupolis 2. At the start of the war the director went back to Ukraine to be with the people he’d met and filmed before. He films from what looks like the last standing shelter in the bombed-out city, where a handful of elderly citizens and parentless children are trying to survive. Raw footage of hunger, debris and corpses in the rubble is accompanied with the constant sound of shelling. Shortly after filming, Kvedaravičius was killed while trying to leave the city.
The festival championed a fresh direction in Greek cinema, with invigorating works from new and established filmmakers including Spiros Stathoulopoulos, Panos H. Koutras, Asimina Proedrou and Spiros Jacovides. Eight years after his road movie Xenia, Koutras returns with Dodo, the surreal Lewis Carroll-inspired story of a bankrupt family who are preparing to wed their daughter for a price when they get visited by a dodo. Meanwhile, Black Stone, debut director Spiros Jacovide’s multi-layered docu-drama about the increasing numbers of missing civil servants in Greece, embraced a multicultural Athens that’s scarcely been seen on screen before.
Another newcomer, writer-director Asimina Proedrou, made an impression with Behind the Haystacks, which moves from smugglers’ coves to the Greek countryside as it follows the travails of a fisherman drawn into the illegal business of trafficking asylum seekers. Spiros Stathoulopoulos’s Cavewoman was also impressively assured, a historical drama inspired by Euripides’ Electra. It features an exceptional performance by Angeliki Papoulia (Dogtooth, Alps) as a resistance fighter determined to kill her own mother after she leaves her family for her Nazi boyfriend.
The festival highlighted two major unsung Greek female directors in its retrospective strands: Maria Gavala and Maria Plyta. Plyta’s 1953 film Eva, especially, was notable for its distinct, melodramatic direction, its sense of island life and summer carelessness. The great Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos was celebrated too, 10 years after his death, with two major art and photography exhibitions and a revealing new documentary. To Each Their Voice: Theo Angelopoulos and Nikos Panayotopoulos featured footage from an unreleased taped interview between the two filmmakers recorded in the mid-80s at Angelopoulos’s house (which burned down in the wildfires of 2018).
Other retrospectives highlights included a near complete showcase of Peter Strickland’s work, encompassing both his latest feature Flux Gourmet and his latest short, Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp), a captivating and unique work of queer desire. In addition, there was a tribute to the late theatre and film director Peter Brook, most notably a screening of his once-believed-missing 1968 film Tell Me Lies. This poetic semi-documentary is a profound study of a mounting political crisis in London’s swinging era, with guest appearances from Glenda Jackson, Mark Jones and Stokely Carmichael.
Winner of the festival’s best feature film prize was Costa Rican director Valentina Maurel’s I Have Electric Dreams, a coming-of-age drama about an adolescent girl caught in between her recently divorced parents. In the co-lead role of the father, Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez won the best actor prize, while best actress went to British star Rosy McEwen for Blue Jean, Georgia Oakley’s vivid debut about identity and homophobia in Thatcherite Britain.
