The Thessaloniki Film Festival is a Thessaloniki-based cultural institution focusing on cinema. The Institution organizes the Thessaloniki International Film Festival every November and the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival every March, while its year-long activity includes the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum and the Thessaloniki Cinemateque, as well as screenings and special tributes held throughout the year, and educational programs. The Thessaloniki Film Festival is the largest film institution in Greece, [1] its activity attracting more than 300.000 visitors yearly. [2]
The Thessaloniki Film Festival aims to promote film culture and education, to support the domestic and international film industry, to form partnerships with national and international cultural institutions and to promote the unique cultural identity of Thessaloniki.
At the heart of the Thessaloniki Film Festival activity lie its two annual festivals:
The Institution activity further includes:
The Institution is housed at the historical “Olympion” theater at the central Aristotelous Square, where its offices and “Olympion” and “Pavlos Zannas” cinemas are located. The Olympion Complex also houses two popular Thessaloniki bars, “Room with a View” and “Green Room”.
The Thessaloniki Cinema Museum is located at Warehouse 1 at the Thessaloniki port. The museum mission is to collect, preserve and promote national film history. The Film Library is housed at the museum premises.
Warehouse C at the Thessaloniki port has been assigned to the Thessaloniki Film Festival since 2019. It serves as the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival hub.
The Institution also runs “John Cassavetes” and “Stavros Tornes” theaters at the Thessaloniki port.
Nikos Georgiou Nikolaidis was a Greek film director, screenwriter, film producer, writer, theatre director, assistant director, record producer, television director, and commercial director. He is usually considered a representative of European avant-garde and experimental art film.
The Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF) is a film festival held every November in Thessaloniki, Greece. It is organized by the Thessaloniki Film Festival under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture. It features international competition sections, and its program includes tributes to major filmmakers and national cinemas, as well as sidebar events such as masterclasses, exhibitions, live concerts and workshops. In addition to TIFF, the Thessaloniki Film Festival holds the annual Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (TDF) in March.
VideoDance Festival started in 2000 in Athens and Thessaloniki as an international dance film festival, but soon it widened up to include more kinds of experiment on movement and the moving image. The festival has counted 7 editions from 2000 to 2007.
The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival is an international documentary festival held every March in Thessaloniki, Greece. TDF, founded in 1999, features competition sections and ranks among the world's leading documentary festivals. Since 2018, TDF is one of the 28 festivals included in the American Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences Documentary Feature Qualifying Festival List. TDF is organized by the Thessaloniki Film Festival cultural institution, which further organizes the annual Thessaloniki International Film Festival, held every November. French producer Elise Jalladeu is TDF's general director; film critic Orestes Andreadakis serves as its director.
Olympus Festival is an annual festival of music and theatre and a major cultural event in Greece. It is the largest event of its kind in northern Greece and takes place annually in the months of July and August. The aim is to provide both, the local population and tourists, with cultural entertainment and thus to promote the contact between different cultures and the tourism of the region. The festival is supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture and the former municipality of Dion, as well as by other local authorities in Pieria.
The Festivals of Thessaloniki are a group of festivals held throughout the year in Thessaloniki, Greece.
The Hellenic Film Academy (HFA) is an initiative of a group of Greek filmmakers. HFA presents the annual Hellenic Film Academy Awards ceremony, awarding the best films of Greek cinema of the last year.
The Greek Film Critics Association Awards is one of the most important and oldest annual awards of the Greek Cinema. The awards are given out by Greek Film Critics Association and began in 1976. The PEKK gives out the awards during Thessaloniki Festival.
Ioannes "Giannis" Spanos, also transliterated as Yannis Spanos, was a Greek music composer and lyricist. In his early days as a musician he was also a piano accompanist. Spanos won the music prize at the 1971 Thessaloniki Film Festival for composing the score of the film Ekeino to kalokairi.
Money, A Mythology of Darkness is a 1998 feature Greek film directed by the Greek director, writer and producer Vassilis Mazomenos. The film is the first European 3D animation feature film and deals with the influence of wealth on humanity. In 2015, The Hindu's film critic, Naman Ramachandran, called it "[t]he Greek film that is most relevant today..."
Morning Patrol is a 1987 Greek science fiction art film directed by Nikos Nikolaidis. It introduced a new iconography to Nikolaidis' work and contains several elements somewhat resembling the thriller genre and post-apocalyptic science fiction. The film has an elaborate yet simple script of strongly contrasting moods. The film's dialogue contains excerpts taken from published works authored by Daphne du Maurier, Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, and Herman Raucher.
Sweet Bunch is a 1983 Greek dramatic experimental independent underground art film directed by Nikos Nikolaidis. The film, produced by Vergeti Brothers and the Greek Film Center, is the second part of the "Years of Cholera" trilogy beginning with The Wretches Are Still Singing (1979) and ending with The Loser Takes It All (2002) which deals with the last decades of the twentieth century. The original Greek title directly references the Greek title of the 1969 Sam Peckinpah film The Wild Bunch. The film uses as background music the 1958 song "Sugartime" written by Charlie Phillips and Odis Echols as well as the 1940 song "Sweet Mara" composed by Leo Rapitis to lyrics by Kostas Kofiniotis which was performed by Kakia Mendri. It was distributed by the Greek Film Center in Greece and by Restless Wind abroad.
Euridice BA 2037 is a 1975 Greek-West German co-production black and white dramatic surrealist underground film directed by Nikos Nikolaidis, his debut feature film.
Telémachos Alexiou is a Greek-German filmmaker and visual artist.
Konstantinos Markoulakis, aka Constantine Markoulakis, born in Athens in 1970, is a Greek director and actor. He graduated from Athens College and he studied in Dramatic School of National Theatre. Since 1991, he has been working continuously in theatre, cinema and television. He has played in successful TV-series and he has won a television award for the TV-series Etsi Xafnika, in 2005. He has also won an Odysseas Award in 2013 London Greek Festival for the film The Telemachy. Markoulakis is active in politics and he was candidate with Drassi.
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Stavros Ditsios is a Greek visual artist, known for abstract paintings and sculpture. He studied as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, from 1997 until 2001. Ditsios now lives and works in Thessaloniki, Greece.
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Maria Iliou is a Greek film director, scriptwriter and producer, well known in Greece and internationally both for her feature films and the historical documentaries she has directed in recent years. She was born in Greece and lives and works in Athens and New York City. Her most well-known films are the features, The Four Seasons (1996), Alexandria, a Love Story (2002) and the historical documentaries The Journey: The Greek American Dream (2007), Smyrna, The Destruction of a Cosmopolitan City, 1900–1922 (2012), From Both Sides of the Aegean (2012) and Dear Aunt Lena (2017). Her films have been shown in various countries and have won major distinctions and awards.
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