Highlights from Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival 2023

This year’s edition of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival took place in the shadow of local tragedy: the head-on collision of two trains, which killed 57 people in the nearby Tempe Valley two days before the event was due to begin. Ceremonies and social events were cancelled, but screenings went ahead as the festival unveiled some 189 features and 48 short documentaries. 

The opening film, Paloma Zapata’s La Singla, centred on Antonia Singla, the legendary Spanish Romani flamenco dancer and actor of the 1960s who was once considered Carmen Amaya’s successor. Despite not being able to hear the music, having lost her hearing from meningitis at a very young age, she became a dancer of ferocious passion and international renown, performing by the stage name La Singla. Fifty years after Singla’s disappearance from the public eye due to depression, Zapata’s film digs into the facts of the dancer’s upbringing in the slums of Barcelona. Although it cultivates unnecessary mystery about her decision to stop dancing, what results is a touching story of a life lived to jazz rhythms.

I Like It Here, which screened in the international competition, is American documentary maker Ralph Arlyck’s very personal account of growing old. His delightfully humorous narration reflects on history, old friendships, family bonds and love; his vulnerable thoughts about ageing and his passion for filming everything result in a powerful work of contemplation in which the filmic medium itself becomes the subject. It was the winner of the festival’s FIPRESCI award for best documentary. 

The same award for a Greek documentary in the international programme went to Giulia Amati’s Kristos: The Last Child, a moving portrait of a 10-year-old boy, the youngest of 44 inhabitants on the tiny Greek island of Arki. Alone at school, Kristos’s teacher is determined to show him a future away from life on the hills with goats, but as we follow Kristos completing sixth grade, we observe his warm admiration for his shepherd father. In Amati’s tender study, Kristos must choose between leaving for a neighbouring island that can offer him a place in secondary school, or following in his brothers’ steps and working for the family.

Kim’s Video embraces many different modes of non-fiction storytelling as it reminisces about the long-lost era of video clubs. Ashley Sabin and David Redmon’s film embarks on a search for a 55,000-tape video collection, a goldmine of rare films on VHS once owned and loaned in 1980s New York by the mysterious Mr Kim, to whom the Coen brothers were once in debt for $600 in late fees. With the decline in VHS viewing, Mr Kim later offered his collection to a small town in Sicily, provided Kim’s Video members were given free access. Combining investigative and essayistic styles, this playful documentary evolves into enjoyable political satire.

Blue Bag Life, which won the Golden Alexander award, having also picked up the audience award at last year’s BFI London Film Festival, takes its name from the blue heroin ‘baggies’ that have been a malign presence in co-director Lisa Selby’s life as she’s grappled with her own mother’s addiction. Admired by the jury panel for its raw depiction of an intergenerational struggle, the film follows Selby as she goes on a difficult personal journey to pick up what’s left from a relationship with her estranged mum and her boyfriend. Co-directed by Rebecca Lloyd-Evans and Alex Fry, it’s a brutally honest, inward-looking film about how Selby processes her feelings of rejection and finds the strength to move on.

This year the festival paid tribute to the Jewish people who departed Thessaloniki on the first train to Auschwitz 80 years ago. Once home to more than 50,000 Jewish people, the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world, Thessaloniki now has just over 1,000. The commemorative programme Adio Kerida (taking its name from a traditional Sephardic song about love) included a selection of films about the shocking realities of the Holocaust and the Jewish experience in Greece. The programme stretched to include Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s German expressionist classic The Golem (1920), one of the first films that warned of the danger of antisemitism, which was screened at Thessaloniki with a score performed live by composer-director Yannis Veslemes.

Greek-Jewish woman Chelly Wilson – the subject of Valerie Kontakos’s Queen of the Deuce – migrated to America on the eve of the war where she met and married her second husband, Jewish projectionist Rex Wilson. For her biographical film, Kontakos interviewed family members and assembled archive photos and sound recordings to sketch a brilliant and magnetic portrait – an X-rated one – of a larger-than-life persona: Wilson went on build a porn cinema empire in 1970s Time Square.

Rounding out the festival on closing night was the world premiere of Who I Am Not (which also screened at this year’s BFI Flare), an intimate, emotional documentary about the lives and struggles of two intersex South Africans. Directed by veteran Romanian actor Tünde Skovrán and executive produced by Patricia Arquette, it received three prizes, including the festival’s Mermaid Award for best LGBTQIA+ themed film. We follow beauty queen Sharon-Rose Khumalo, who faces an identity crisis after finding out she has XY chromosomes, and male-presenting intersex activist Dimakatso Sebidi as they struggle to find work. 

Although an estimated 150 million people worldwide were born with intersex traits, these variations are still little understood or represented on screen. A film with the power to make us more alert to non-binary existences, Tünde’s sincere and eloquent work came packed with affecting moments.