Sunsets, beaches, and summer flings. Or maybe not. The Greece of the postcards and the real one, both waiting for you to discover them.

Normal

Based on Petros Tatsopoulos’ novel, Renos Charalambidis signs a requiem for all the sniffies out there, with characters out of a Jim Jarmusch film, in situations that foreshadow the notorious Greek crisis.

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His Masters in Philosophy has made Stefanos treat all human beings as inferiors. Following his discharge from the army, he feels like the world is his oyster. Truth is, his only oysters are his recently deceased mother’s debts, and his once devoted girlfriend’s rejection. Tsakiris, a friend from school who now leads an illustrious career in crime, suggests that they rob the bank where Aris – a social rebel role model from their puberty and Stefanos’ Pygmalion – now works as a cashier.

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Official Selection | Los Angeles Greek Film Festival | 2007

The Heart of the Beast

In the third part of his Trilogy of History, Theo Angelopoulos constructs one of the most relentless allegories in European cinema. A political requiem for the moral decay of the post–Civil War bourgeoisie, and for all that it sought to bury.

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During a hunting weekend on New Year’s Day, a group of wealthy bourgeois discover the body of a Civil War partisan, buried for decades in the snow. The presence of the dead man shatters their superficial calm, forcing them to confront their past, their responsibilities, and their complicity.

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Golden Hugo Best Film | Chicago International Film Festival | 1977
Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1977
Best Film of the Year | Turkish Film Critics Association | 1977

The Hunters

The first film of the important trilogy "Odes to Existence" by Stavros Psyllakis. Starting from childhood and youth memories, experiences and concerns, we follow the author's titanic existential struggle, in a highly penetrating portrait that escapes the narrow biographical boundaries.

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Giorgos Maniatis (1939-2018), legionnaire in Algeria at the age of 18, writer and musician afterwards, defines himself as a "public danger". The film seeks the adventure of his soul, a consciousness on constant alert, incendiary and self-immolating.

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Second Best Film | Chalkida Greek Documentary Film Festival | 2019

FOR NO REASONS meetings with Yorgos Maniatis

The much-discussed Palme d’Or by Theo Angelopoulos follows the legendary Bruno Ganz on a final walk through memory, the present, and great, unspoken farewells. Cinema here becomes the ultimate journey through time.

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An elderly writer spends one last day in Thessaloniki as he prepares to be admitted to hospital. During his wanderings, he encounters a migrant child and begins to travel between moments of the present and memories of his past. This journey brings to the surface unfulfilled relationships, lost words, and unresolved goodbyes.

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Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1998
Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 1998
Best Film | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998
Best Supporting Actress (Eleni Gerasimidou) | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998
Best Director | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998
Best Screenplay | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998
Best Set Decoration | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998
Best Music | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998

Eternity and a Day

Ten Hellenic Film Academy Awards, Greece's official entry for the Oscars, numerous festival distinctions and two outstanding performances by Vangelis Mourikis and Argyris Pantazaras, in Tzortzis Grigorakis’ directorial debut that combines western, ecology and ancient tragedy in the Greek province.

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Withdrawn in a mountain forest, a man fights against an expanding industrial unit in the area. His alienated son’s arrival after his ex wife’s death and his claim for the part of the estate that she left him, will soon result in a clash between the two men.

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CICAE Award | Berlin Film Festival Panorama | 2020
Best Actor (Vangelis Mourikis) | Sarajevo Film Festival | 2020
Silver Alexander for Best Film | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 2020
Audience Award | Tessaloniki Film Festival | 2020
10 Iris Awards | Hellenic Film Academy Awards | 2021

Digger

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

Long before media criticism became a commonplace, Angelopoulos dismantled the television spectacle as a mechanism of power, employing sharp irony and rigorous formal control. His first film - already functioning as an early manifesto - foreshadows the legendary trajectory that would follow.

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A group of journalists asks passers-by to define the characteristics that, in their opinion, make up the “ideal man”. After interviewing various women, they select a candidate and give him the opportunity to spend a night with a film star. However, the man soon realizes that his image of the world of fame and admiration, and all that it promises, is far removed from reality.

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Best Short Film – Film Critics Association Award | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1968

Broadcast

The reinvention of the Greek family in an improvised and playful paradise of youth, overflowing with glitter and soul. Silver Alexander Award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival for the feature debut of Nikos Pastras, which was discussed as few others in summer cinemas of 2023.

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The Bastards have left the city alone. In the countryside, their new home only smells of summer. Five girls and five boys live here, now, for the present. No one gets near here, here all of them keep watch, kiss each other, play dead. They are still kids. They are your kids. They are our Bastards.

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Silver Alexander - Film Forward | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 2022

BASTARDS

Nikos Grammatikos' legendary film, a naturalistic portrait of the Greek countryside, based on a true story that marked the local Peloponnesian society, with one of the most iconic performances by Vangelis Mourikis and music by Thanasis Papakonstantinou.

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Once released from prison, 35-year-old Vangelis leaves Athens and his involvement with the world of drugs and returns to his family home in a village in the Peloponnese. But he encounters the xenophobia of his fellow villagers, who prevent him from making a new start.

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Best Actor (Vangelis Mourikis) | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 2002
Best Set Decoration | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 2002
Best Sound | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 2002

The King

The refugee tragedy of recent years inspires Abbe Hassan for a shocking directorial feature debut, a journey into the brightest light and the deepest darkness of the human condition.

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A Syrian girl flees to Turkey, bound for Sweden and reunification with her sisters and parents. After a raid by the Turkish immigration authorities she is rescued by one of the smugglers who organized her escape. The seemingly mismatched duo begin their journey to freedom.

Exodus

With exquisite black and white photography and set against the backdrop of the Western Suburbs as a rather repulsive place, Economides for the first time lowers the tempo of the dialogues and gives a pessimistic look at the perpetuating model of the comfortable modern Greek.

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After the death of his father, Nikos moves from Ptolemaida to Athens. His uncle offers him food and shelter while he begins to take care of his dogs. Alone in an isolated suburb, he is carried through the routine of his misery until his relationship with his aunt changes everything.

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Iris Award for Best Film | Hellenic Film Academy | 2011
Iris Award for Best Director | Hellenic Film Academy | 2011

Knifer

An anarchist creator condenses all the conflicts of the time from the Civil War to the regime change (Metapolitefsi), through an allegorical story in the form of a modern tragedy. Papatakis draws inspiration from a true incident somewhere in Spain, to talk about a wounded homeland.

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During the Greek dictatorship, a young man flees for Paris, where he seeks help from a lonely, misanthropic distant relative who owns a fur processing workshop. He carries with him the photo of a singer whom he presents as his sister, creating a series of misunderstandings which drag him into a vicious circle of successive lies and fantasies. The furrier will fall in love with the girl in the photo.

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Best Screenplay | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1986
Hellenic Association of Film Critics Best Film Award | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1986

The Photograph

The Greek short film that Moonlight's Barry Jenkins publicly praised, is a rare for our country contact with science fiction cinema, through a brilliant invention - the tender wink at the genre's history and its connection with current affairs.

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Earth has been abandoned for a long time now and the human race has found refuge in outer space. Three archeologists return to Earth to investigate where a mysterious five tone signal is coming from.

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Official Selection - Critics' Week | Cannes Film Festival | 2018

Third Kind

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

Poised between narrative cinema and the poetic language that would later define his work, Angelopoulos makes an appointment with History in a politically pivotal and cinematographically essential transitional work.

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On the eve of the 1936 elections, a desperate prisoner, accused of murdering a trade unionist, takes a member of parliament hostage in his cell, in an attempt to pressure the authorities into securing his release.

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Best Director | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1972
Best Cinematography | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1972
FIPRESCI Prize - Forum of New Cinema | Berlin International Film Festival | 1973

Days of '36

Un Certain Regard award in Cannes for one of those rare directorial debuts that uncover a tremendous new talent. Molly Manning Walker observes without rambling, unearths terror amid words and delivers an astonishing study on consent in a completely contemporary manner.

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Three young girls from England travel to Malia to experience the best summer of their lives. They want to live the all inclusive Dionysian experience of the Greek summer: alcohol, clubbing, meeting boys. It is, after all, something of a coming-of-age tradition. But something will happen on the last night, something that they themselves can't quite put their finger on at first. And it's enough to shatter every teenage dream.

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Un Certain Regard Award | Cannes Film Festival | 2023
Golden Athena | Athens Film Festival | 2023

How to Have Sex

For many, the greatest Greek film ever made, mythic in stature within the collective consciousness of local cinephiles, and blessed with the immortal soundtrack of Manos Loizos.

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A sergeant meets Evdokia, a prostitute; they fall in love and get married. But Evdokia longs to live freely.

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Best Actress (Maria Vassiliou) | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1971

Evdokia

The most explosive debut in Greek cinema of the 21st century, the "tragic comedy of the lives of the dead moving on" according to Economides himself, a unique deconstruction of the middle-class Greek family that begins with a broken air conditioner.

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One day, in the middle of a heatwave, the house of Dimitris, a small family man in his 50s, somewhere in Korydallos, turns into a battlefield! All the family members take it out on each other with incredible verbal violence and revelations of passions, jealousies and professional disagreements. Until an unexpected confession blows everything to smithereens.

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Hellenic Association of Film Critics Award | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 2003

Matchbox

Troubled in its time by the distribution circuit, extremely but unexpectedly pop after years, "Soul Kicking" was the film that showed even more than the others that Economides could create his own unique universe, a cinema that would be hard to find its counterpart in Greece.

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Takis is a middle-aged craft worker, divorced, remarried and with a newborn baby. With pressures from everywhere. No one leaves him alone. His wife, his employer, his relatives, his friends. Violence and oppression. Verbal, mental, physical. All against one and God against all. The lit fuse is several yards from the gunpowder. But in the end it reaches it.

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Official Selection - International Competition | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 2006

Soul Kicking

One of Pantelis Voulgaris' most famous films and at the same time one of the most important moments in contemporary Greek cinema, this Venice and Thessaloniki award-winning story of doomed love is still moving and thrilling.

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The story of a young left-wing couple from the early post-civil war years to the post-communist revolution of 1974, during the harsh years of lawlessness, persecution, arrests and imprisonment.

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Special Mention for Best Performance (Themis Bazaka) | Venice Film Festival | 1985
Specia Mention - OCIC Award | Venice Film Festival | 1985
Best Film | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1985
Best Actress (Themis Bazaka) | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1985

Stone Years

Originally drawing from the cinema of Yannis Economides, Fokion Bogris soon develops his story by following his own unique path, and provides us with one of the finest samples of fresh Greek cinema, with noir references and remarkable realism in the depiction of his world.

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Vaggelis, a remnant of the rave generation, gets by selling weed. He would like a steady job with no risks. Petros, a thug from the southern suburbs. He wants respect and a family. Katerina, unwittingly, brings them under the same roof.

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Best Supporting Actor Award (Stathis Stamoulakatos) | Hellenic Film Academy | 2021

Amercement

The story of the legendary "Babel", an idea much bigger than a magazine or a festival, which influenced, from the beginning of the 80s and for two and a half decades, the cultural fabric of the country through the contemporary trends of designers, artists, musicians and writers which “Babel” introduced to the public.

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Athens, February 1981.
How a group of people, with the sole motivation of their love for the 9th Art, taught the Greek public that comics are not just for children.
The story of the legendary comics magazine (and not only) Babel and its international festivals.

Babel: From Silence to the Explosion

A gripping exploration of the Other, told through a coming-of-age tale that blends social realism with metaphysical visions drawn from horror cinema. Iris Award for Best Director and a Special Mention at the Locarno Film Festival, for Araceli Lemos’s blood-soaked debut.

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Emy feels like a stranger in the tight-knit community of Charismatic Filipino Catholics in Piraeus, where her sister Teresa is warmly embraced. When Teresa becomes pregnant, Emy is drawn to mysterious forces that seem to reside within her.

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Special Mention | Locarno Film Festival | 2021
Best Director | Hellenic Film Academy | 2022
Best Supporting Actress (Hasmine Killip) | Hellenic Film Academy | 2022
Women in Film & Television (WIFT) Award | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 2021

Holy Emy

The 2004 Olympic Games ended on time, but what they left behind is still languishing slowly. Sofia Exarchou’s directorial debut portays a suitable and weird portrait of a lost generation who learned to regard the term "crisis" as something normal.

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Ten years after the 2004 Olympic Games, a group of boys live among the abandoned sports facilities of the Olympic Village in Athens. The boys stroll among the ruins, setting up games and organizing dog matings to make money. Dimitris and Anna try to escape from the Village and direct themselves towards the tourist hotels of the southern suburbs. As their adventures continue and the two children enter the tourists’ lives, Dimitris’ desire for acceptance will be tested in a violent way.

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Best Debutant Actor (Dimitra Vlagopoulou) | Athens International Film Festival | 2017
Best Debutant Director | Athens International Film Festival | 2017
New Directors Award | San Sebastián International Film Festival | 2016
Best Actress (Dimitra Vlagopoulou) | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 2016
Official Selection | Warsaw International Film Festival | 2016
Best First Time Director | Hellenic Film Academy Awards | 2017
Best Sound | Hellenic Film Academy Awards | 2017

Park

In his second feature film, Alexandros Voulgaris tenderly charts the emotional quests of an entire generation at the beginning of a new millennium, but above all he introduces us to a dog called Roz (meaning Pink).

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Vassilis is a loner, he writes music and reminisces about Emily, a girl from Ireland whom he fell in love with on a New Year's Eve in Berlin. During the filming of a documentary about immigrant musicians in Greece, he meets 11-year-old Snezana from Ukraine. A special relationship develops between them, one that helps each of them free themselves from their own ghosts.

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Official Selection | Toronto Film Festival | 2007
Official Selection | Karlovy Vary Film Festival | 2007
Official Selection - International Competition | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 2006