The 47th Thessaloniki Film Festival

Posted by Loukas Tsouknidas (loukas@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 19, 2006

November 17^th - 26^th

Wim Wenders was the center of attention in this year’s Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece, the 47th in a row. A retrospective of 27 films, fiction and documentaries, gave the fans the opportunity to brush up their memories and the rest a chance to know him better. The master himself was present, accepting an award from Theo Angelopoulos and giving two really interesting master classes in front of hundreds of cinema lovers. He talked about the genre of the “Road Movie” along with the Brazilian director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) and later on he teamed up with his cinematographer Franz Lustig (Don’t Come Knocking) to give a lecture on photography, digital and traditional.

The president of the committee was the American producer Christine Vachon of “Killer Films”. Luckily, she found the time between screenings, to give a lecture on cinema production and the difficulties of independent filmmaking.

Another indy American was also in the spotlight. Jim McKay’s 4 films as a director were shown to us, serving as an example of a different kind of cinema. It was a small revelation for me, since I believe the very essence of an independent film is to show people and stories that would never have been shown without being “transferred” to sellable scripts. McKay’s “heroes” seemed very real, even with the whole stereotype mixing. One of his first stars, Lily Taylor (Girls Town), showed up in the city for a masterclass in acting.

Other famous lecturers were Mogens Rukov, the “Dogme-95” scriptwriting mastermind, Chen Khaige, the famous Chinese director and Kostas Gavras, the internationally known Greek director.

Part of the program was devoted to the great Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer. One of the first of the Czech surrealistic movement, Svankmajer, now 72, was a master of all kinds of stop motion animation, art direction and editing. Some of his shorts are exceptionally ahead of their time. He admitted that as a movement, they weren’t as critical of the political situation in their country as they could have been. Nevertheless, his anarchistic view of known stories like “Faust” and “Alice in wonderland” is still quite captivating.

There was a big Brazilian and Chinese cinema special with a few older movies and many recent ones. The “Balkan Survey” section spotlighted some films from Balkan countries. The last Berlin Festival winner, “Grbavica”, was on of them. Multi-awarded Turkish director and photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan was given the section’s retrospective.

The International Competition consisted of 14 movies from all over the world, two of them Greek. The 1^st prize, the “Golden Alexander”, was awarded to the Korean film “Family Ties” by Kim Tae-yong; a good movie that was also acknowledged as number one by the festival’s spectators. “The Point” by Canadian Joshua Dorsey was my personal favorite; a great project that had underprivileged kids from a poor Montreal neighborhood playing themselves, in a story based on their own experiences. Instead of a possible self pitying semi-documentary they made a mystery film and acted it out as true professionals. Two of them are already following film related studies.

The Special Screenings, which included movies like “Fast Food Nation” and “The Last King of Scotland”, were packed. But the one that really made an impact was Hungarian’s Gyorgy Palfi (Hukkle) sophomoric Thessaloniki appearance, the 3-part, grotesque, twisted fairy tale, “Taxidermia”. It’s an unbelievable comment on three periods in Hungary’s modern history with a last sequence full of great sarcasm.

The Greek competition showed one big winner: Angeliki Antoniou’s “Edwart”, a movie based on the true story of an Albanian immigrant who, killed a man in Greece, escaped to his homeland but came back to face the consequences later on. It thrived in almost all categories, a real triumph for a film that almost didn’t make it to the competition.

In conclusion, a great festival with even more attendance than last year. It’s slowly making its way up with Europe’s best film fests and new creator markets.

Read more articles by Loukas Tsouknidas