Documentary

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How did "Alien" make generations of film lovers experience the ultimate horror? Through discussion, archival footage and interviews, a documentary charts the making of one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, with a strong artistic stamp and enduring commercial success.

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An in-depth journey into the world of the iconic 1979 "Alien", along with the people behind its creation. See how one of the scariest films of all time came to life 40 years ago, inspired by ancient mythology and our universal fears.

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Official Selection | CPH:DOX | 2019

Memory: The Origins of Alien

Man, dreams and the sea. The combination of rare archival footage and modern underwater shots in Lefteris Charitos’s impressively humane documentary parallel the experience of free-diving with an inner-self journey through the world of Jacques Mayol, the Dolphin Man.

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Dolphin Man draws us into the world of Jacques Mayol, capturing his compelling journey and immersing viewers into the sensory and transformative experience of free-diving. From the Mediterranean to Japan and from India to the Bahamas, we meet Mayol's closest friends and family to reveal the portrait of a man who reached the limits of the human body and mind, not just to break records but hoping to discover the deeper affinity between human beings and the sea.

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Best Documentary | Hellenic Film Academy Awards | 2018

Dolphin Man: the Story of Jacques Mayol

"They don't build statues of critics" says a popular meme, but they did the math without Roger Ebert. The most famous film critic ever to have lived, he was loved and read by generations of viewers thanks to his directness of writing and his open mind; a documentary about his life couldn't help but be a documentary about the love of cinema itself.

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The life of film critic Roger Ebert, the highlights of his career, his occasional rivalry with fellow critic Gene Siskel, personal and professional highlights. A documentary on the world-renowned film critic in a look that is personal, funny, painful and transcendent. Based on his best-selling memoir, the documentary explores the legacy of Ebert's life, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning film criticism at the Chicago Sun-Times to becoming one of the most influential cultural voices in America.

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Best Documentary | Critics' Choice Awards | 2015

Life Itself

Linking the exploration of Nature and History, the natural landscape, historical memory and the open wound of the Pinochet dictatorship, Chilean Patricio Guzmán completes his great trilogy by turning his attention to the Andes mountain range.

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After the masterpiece "Nostalgia for the Light" and the Silver Bear award-winning "Pearl Button", Patricio Guzman now turns his gaze to the Chilean Andes mountain range. Taking as his point of reference another characteristic natural feature of a homeland that he now barely recognizes, the leading exponent of poetic and political documentary cinema continues a unique exploration of this delicate frontier where man and the eternity of Nature meet.

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Best Documentary | Cannes Film Festival | 2019
Official Selection | San Sebastian Film Festival | 2019

The Cordillera of Dreams

Far from the cliché dramas about inspired teachers in "difficult" schools, Maria Speth's documentary is a rare cinematic record, a much-needed documentation of the educational process in Europe's diverse contemporary reality.

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Dieter Bachmann is the teacher of class 6B of the introductory year for the high school in Stadlendorf, a city of immigrants, whose children he prepares for the German reality away from strict academic guidelines.

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Jury Prize | Berlin Film Festival | 2021
Audience Award | Berlin Film Festival | 2021

Mr. Bachmann and His Class

Best-selling author, psychoanalyst Irvin Yalom takes his own turn on the couch for the purposes of a fascinating documentary. Lessons of concentrated wisdom, prompted by the most important milestones of his life, his relationships with his loved ones and the constant challenges of his profession.

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"Yalom’s cure" is so much more than a typical documentary about someone’s life. It's a wonderful existential journey through the workings and complexities of the human mind. Our co-traveller is the famous psychiatrist, his essential ideas and his wisdom.

Yalom's Cure

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And don’t things become more immediate when there’s the testimony of an image? Wim Wenders, in his Oscar-nominated documentary, follows photographer and activist Salgado, who has been capturing neglected societies for decades.

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For the past 40 years, photographer Sebastiao Salgado has been travelling across the continents, recording humanity’s impact and witnessing major events of our recent history. Present during wars, famines, refugee waves, companion of people from all over the world, he continues to travel, seeking pristine spots, wild flora and fauna and majestic landscapes, on a mission to record the beauty of planet Earth.

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Nominated for Best Documentary | Oscars | 2015
Prize of the Ecumenical Jury - Special Mention | Cannes Film Festival | 2014
Special Jury Prize - Un Certain Regard  | Cannes Film Festival | 2014
Audience Award | San Sebastián Film Festival | 2014

The Salt of the Earth: A Journey with Sebastião Salgado

It was meant to be the cinematic event of the 60s. Instead, three weeks into filming, the project gets abandoned, leaving behind an unfinished masterpiece. Completed in 2009 as a mix of fiction and documentary, this “Inferno” is a film jewel and a glance to a parallel world of beauty.

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In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot picks Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani to star in “Inferno”. The enigmatic project would focus on a hotel manager possessed by the demons of jealousy, and was meant to be the biggest cinematic event of the decade, with Clouzot being given carte blanche and a large budget. However, during filming everything goes wrong, the project gets abandoned, and something that was meant to make history is left unfinished.

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Best Documentary Award | César Awards | 2010
International Jury Award for Best Documentary | Sao Paolo International Film Festival | 2009

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

A survivor of a brutal murderous attack by her partner in Italy, gives the director Nina Maria Paschalidou the opportunity to make a courageous and necessary documentary, which makes clear the absolute necessity of the legalization of the term "femicide".

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In Italy, one woman is murdered every three days. Nunzia Maiorano, Alba Chiara Baroni and Lorena Quaranta were murdered by their partners. Their families and friends relive the horror as they seek to understand the growing phenomenon of femicide.

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Official Selection - International Competition | Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival | 2022

Femicidio

Any list of concert films worth its salt places "Stop Making Sense" at the very top. Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece (The Silence of the Lambs) captures the Talking Heads at their absolute peak — now restored in stunning digital quality to celebrate the film’s 40th anniversary.

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Stop Making Sense brings the Talking Heads to the big screen, capturing their electrifying live performances at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in December 1983 — David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison joined by an ecstatic ensemble of musicians.

Stop Making Sense

Werner Herzog takes us on a cinematic journey 30,000 years into the past, with exclusive access to the French cave where the oldest known human paintings are found. It takes your breath away.

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In 1994, a team of scientists discovered a cave in the South of France that had been perfectly preserved for more than 20,000 years and contained the oldest known human paintings. Aware of the cultural importance of the Chauvet Cave, the French government immediately cut off all access to it, except for a few archaeologists and paleontologists. For this documentary, Herzog was granted limited access allowing us to enter the cave and admire works of art created 32,000 years ago.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Through more than 20 conversations recorded at his home, this documentary maps the life and career of the incomparable David Lynch - a must-watch gem for every fan of the director.

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Director David Lynch takes us on a journey through the years that shaped him. From his idyllic childhood in a small American town to the dark streets of Philadelphia, we follow Lynch as he reflects on the moments that helped forge his career, offering a deeper understanding of the beloved filmmaker.

David Lynch: The Art Life

How long would you fight to find the perfect wave? The documentary that changed surf culture became the first to film surfers riding the waves at the southern tip of Bali, helping the country become a massive tourist destination. A documentary full of action, wild beauty, and the search for harmony around - and in - the sea.

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A group of surfers learn to live in spiritual harmony with nature, making their own boards - and houses - as they travel to various countries in search of the perfect wave in northeastern Australia, Bali and Hawaii.

Morning of the Earth

Veteran Patricio Guzman (Nostalgia for the Light, Pearl Button) reconnects the past with the present, turning his gaze to the social upheaval that sparked in Chile in October 2019, in a gripping and beautiful narrative of the change happening before our eyes.

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In October 2019, 1.5 million people marched through the streets of Santiago demanding more democracy, a better life, education, health care and a new constitution. Chile has regained its memory, and for the first time since the cruel 1973, its people are vigorously demanding their rights.

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Official Selection - International Competition | Cannes Film Festival | 2017
Official Selection - International Competition | San Sebastian Film Festival | 2017

My Imaginary Country

Can a film about education move you to tears? Of course it can, as is evidenced in this award-winning documentary about a school year, that was beloved by audiences in France and is sure to speak to the hearts of all. The young students in the class steal the show.

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In rural France, schoolteacher Georges Lopez educates 12 children, whose ages range from 4 to 11 years old. Over the course of a year, the soon-to-retire Lopez instructs them all in one small classroom with the traditional tools of French teaching: rote repetition and the dictation of literary passages for copying. As the seasons pass, Lopez must keep his students disciplined while preparing the older children for the exams that will determine their educational future.

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Best Editing | César Awards | 2003
Nominated for Best Film not in the English Language | BAFTA Awards | 2004
Best Documentary Award | Valladolid International Film Festival | 2002

To Be and to Have

The Oscar for Best Documentary in 1985 and the Grand Prize at the Sundance Festival are just a few of the accolades for one of the most important LGBTQ documentary films that years later inspired Gus Van Sant for the also Oscar-winning Milk with Sean Penn.

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The political career and legacy of Harvey Milk, the gay activist who became San Francisco's first openly gay mayor, from his early days to his shocking 1978 assassination at City Hall.

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Best Documentary Oscar | Academy Awards | 1985
Special Jury Prize | Sundance Film Festival | 1985

The Times of Harvey Milk

Pivotal and seminal to the queer community, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's documentary became an instant classic and is revealing about the visibility and representation of diversity in mainstream culture.

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The portrayal of the LGBTQ community and the covert or overt references to it as captured in the mainstream Hollywood studio system from the birth of cinema to 1995.

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Teddy Award for Best Queer Documentary | Berlin Film Festival | 1996
Freedom of Expression Award | Sundance Film Festival | 1996
Nomination for 5 Primetime Emmy Awards | Emmy Awards | 1996

The Celluloid Closet

It's never too late to become a secret agent and live the dangerous mission of a lifetime. That's the message of this surprisingly touching and feelgood documentary from Chile that offers a refreshing look at old age and was rightfully nominated for an Oscar.

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A private investigator hires an elderly man to sneak into a nursing home in El Monte, Chile, to investigate whether one of the residents is being mistreated by nursing home staff.

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Nomination for Best Documentary | Oscars | 2021
Audience Award | San Sebastian Film Festival | 2020
Official Selection | Sundance Film Festival | 2020

The Mole Agent

Academy Award for Best Documentary for a powerful film that sheds light on one of the lesser-known, yet by no means insignificant, aspects of the Israeli military’s long-standing aggression against the Palestinian people.

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With the assistance of Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, Palestinian activist Basel Adra documents over a five-year period the displacement of Palestinian residents from the Masafer Yatta region by the Israeli military, under the pretext of designating the area as a military firing zone.

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Best Documentary | Oscars | 2025
Documentary Award | Berlin International Film Festival | 2024
Panorama Audience Award | Berlin International Film Festival | 2024
Best Documentary | Athens International Film Festival | 2024
Best European Documentary | European Film Awards | 2024
Audience Award | Millennium Docs Against Gravity FF | 2024

No Other Land

Stavros Psyllakis ("There Was no Other Way") in another shocking documentary. Is living with cancer an "experience of self-awareness in a mortgaged future"? Metaxa hospital, its doctors and staff guide us on a unique cinematic journey of life.

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Starting with doctors and staff of the Metaxa anti-cancer hospital who suffer from cancer themselves, we follow this special group of people as they continue to work in the hospital. From the shock of the first time one hears it, to the experience of "... I learned to listen to time", cancer transforms from a death-threat to a life teacher for these people, not only adding years to their lives, but also adding Life to their years.

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Second Best Film Award | Halkida Greek Documentary Festival | 2012

METAXA listening to time

"How can you fly without wings?"... is the protagonist's soliloquy in Stavros Psyllakis' new film. Gypsy stories of people who live, dream and hope. The film looks deeply into the eyes of the protagonists.

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Athanasia, Theodoros, George and Chrysoula live and move around Zefyri, Menidi and the wider region. They no longer live in chattels and camps, but in a modern urban environment, each according to what they can afford. Their children and grandchildren are trying to educate themselves. Through small stories about their lives, each of them slowly unfolds his own special personality. They become people with dreams, hopes and disappointments, but also with an ancestry that has importance.

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Second Prize for Social-Political Documentary | Kastellorizo Documentary Festival | 2017
Best Film | Ierapetra Documentary Fesstival | 2016

Short Gypsy Stories

Olympia is three months pregnant when cancer knocks on her door. Faced with the dilemma of who to save first, herself or the fetus, she decides to save both. Another shocking example of Stavros Psyllakis' anthropocentric cinema, awarded by its audience at the 17th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival

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Olympia, a 33-year old woman, is already three months pregnant when she finds out that she has lung cancer. After enough thought, she decides to keep the baby. Four months after giving birth to a healthy baby and while her cancer progresses fast, at the initiative of her doctor, Psyllakis and his colleagues will stay near the new mother and her family for four days, recording everything they can.

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Audience Award | Thessaloniki Documentary Festival | 2015

Olympia

Unique in the domestic artistic context and catalytically influential on successive generations of musicians, Lena Platonos, the living history of the Greek electronic music scene, is finally getting the documentary she deserves.

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The work of Lena Platonos, an important figure in the Greek electronic scene with radical works that proved ahead of their time, is increasingly being heard internationally thanks to the re-release of her records and the remixes of her songs. With the help of collaborators, friends and current Greek and international artists, the film returns to the time when these revolutionary records were created.

lambda pi

Based on the unpublished material filmed in 2007 as part of the documentary "There Was No Other Way", the great Stavros Psyllakis turns a personal confession into an essay on historical memory and the value of struggle.

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Yannis Lionakis, 87 years old, persecuted and rewarded guerilla, on a farewell trip to the place that defined his life, narrates his incredible survival story during 14 years (1948-1962), starting with the end of the Civil War in Crete. The body of the film is unpublished material shot in 2007 as part of the documentary "There Was No Other Way".

FAREWELL The Memory of the Land

The cancers that oppress our lives, the things we lost, we forgot or we feel unable to enjoy anymore, in a daily life that crushes us and that we uncritically accept. Stavros Psyllakis treats Alekos Zoukas as a literary "hero" in an elegy on friendship.

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Alekos Zoukas is a very lovable person, a reveler and at the same time deeply thinking and contemplative. A man once you meet, you cannot forget. In the film, the director's travels with Alekos Zoukas and his friends in Pirsogianni are alternated with Alekos' confessions about his experience with cancer. A eulogy to friendship from a sinful angel.

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Best Documentary | Chania Film Festival | 2021
Best Director | Chalkida Greek Documentary Film Festival | 2021