A traveler at the inn of a small village witnesses a vampire attack a young woman. Elsewhere, a spirit falls in love with a young bride on her wedding day and takes the form of her husband to stay with her. At the same time, residents of Tokyo, after the suicide of a young student, witness terrifying visions transmitted via the Internet.

All of the above are nothing more than scripts from iconic films in which ghosts are the protagonists and which will participate in the great tribute of the 64th Thessaloniki Film Festival, next November.

“An art of illusion and revitalization, cinema is perhaps the most haunting of all mediums. Ghosts are cinematic in their essence, automatic disruptions in space and time,” says New York Film Festival Artistic Director and internationally renowned film critic Dennis Lim, who is curating the tribute as guest curator.

The ghoststhe figures that haunt us and dwell where the realm of imagination meets beliefs, unacknowledged fears and man’s timeless attraction to the metaphysicalare some of the most powerful symbols in the history of the world and cinema.

They were born and traveled through the centuries through folk stories and myths, forming an integral part of a universal tradition. Balancing between the invisible world and the gaze of the visible, they resemble an attempt by the human mind to understand the intangible, the ineffable and the metaphysical. Ghosts of the Darkroom invites cinephiles to a magical and enchanted world where shadows, illusions and apparitions rule.

“I am thrilled to be collaborating with the Thessaloniki International Film Festival on a program that brings together many different cinematic depictions of hauntings and I hope the tribute illuminates the deep kinship between ghosts and movies,” adds Dennis Lim.

With the dedication, the Festival explores the deeper symbolism and hidden allegories behind the portrayal of ghosts in cinema. The ghosts of History, which keep the collective traumas unhealed, the ghosts of politics, which even today determine the way we see and perceive the world, the ghosts of faith, which look back on our deepest anxieties, but also our personal ghosts, reflecting the losses of yesterday and the expectation of tomorrow.

The tribute also inspires the great visual exhibition of the 64th edition, which hides many surprises. Also, the established bilingual special thematic edition of the Festival is this year dedicated to ghosts and will include texts and analyzes by film theorists and creators, an editorial text by Dennis Lim himself, as well as a presentation of the films of the tribute.

Among the films participating in the tribute, Carl Dreyer’s Vampire (1932), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), Manny Kaul’s Duvidha (1973), Theodore Angelopoulos’ The Hunters (1977), Sandal’s D’est (1993) Akerman, The Phantom (2000) by João Pedro Rodríguez, Pulse (2001) by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Inland Empire (2006) by David Lynch, Yella (2007) by Christian Petzold. The tribute is completed by about ten short films – a surprise from the beginnings of cinema (1928) until today.