Today, the Thessaloniki Film Festival celebrated the start of the new film season with popcorn, hot dogs and everything a canteen outside the dark room includes. As of tomorrow, three films will be screened in the two theaters of the Cinema Olympian and on the occasion of this event, the annual activity of the Festival was presented to the journalists.

Flagship with the two major international events for which it is famous, the Film Festival every November and the Documentary Festival every March, this cultural organization confirms its wider presence in the city, throughout the year.

“If an organization (cinematic, musical or theatrical) does not have a continuous interventionist presence in the city that hosts it, it cannot continue to exist,” said the artistic director of the Festival, Orestis Andreadakis.

The renewed and pluralistic program of the 2023-2024 film season includes great first-run films, which received awards and honors at the most important international festivals, landmark films of world cinema. Also, new sections of screenings are added, exciting and inventive tributes from the Thessaloniki Film Library to favorite creators and popular cinema trends, a rich program with educational activities and films for children and the whole family, as well as pop-up screenings on specially selected dates.

Fundamentals of Cinema – Season 2

After the successful course of the new section Fundamentals of Cinema last year, with consecutive sold outs at the respective screenings, this year they return even more powerfully with nine masterpieces of cinema, which left their mark on the history of the seventh art.

“It’s a different way to approach a well-known, classic, important film in the history of cinema. An expert, theoretician or artist talks about the film at the beginning and after the screening there is an interactive discussion with the audience, where he reveals the secrets of this film, helps them to unlock its world and find other ways to approach it the magic of the big screen”, explained Mr. Andreadakis

The first date for this year comes on Wednesday, October 18, with one of the delightful films of American independent cinema, which has influenced countless directors, Beyond Paradise by Jim Jarmusch.

Fundamentals Midnight

Six iconic films from the genres of horror and cult, are part of the special section of late-night screenings, which invite viewers to explore the most adventurous paths of cinema, through creations that emit a dark and forbidden charm.

Fundamentals Midnight opens Friday the 13th (October) with William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, exactly half a century after its release.

Important tributes from the Film Library

The Thessaloniki Film Library has edited three original tributes for this year, which are aimed at a wide audience, exploring a rich spectrum of cinematic genres and currents. The dance will be opened by the complete retrospective on the work of Stavros Tsiolis, beloved by the Greek public. Immediately after, the tribute to the unforgettable collaborations between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, who composed one of the most stormy and explosive duets in the history of cinema, which left behind timeless masterpieces and countless outrageous stories, will take over. The curtain on this year’s activities of the Thessaloniki Film Library will fall with the tribute to Korean crime movies, which brings together one of the most influential and thriving film markets-industries of today and the -perhaps- most popular genre of our time.

“The contribution of the festival to the familiarization – especially of the young audience – with great creators and important moments in the history of cinema is very important”, emphasized the President of the Board of the Festival Eleftheria Thanoulis, who, as she revealed, as a student studied cinema in of the great tributes made by the Festival. “Because I like to combine my position on the board with my main job of teaching and researching at the university, I now encourage students from the position of professor to come here to study cinema,” she said.

Screenings and activities for young cinephiles from the Cinema Museum

The educational programs and international collaborations organized by the Thessaloniki Film Museum, the channel of communication between the students and the cinema through the screenings of the “Schools go to the cinema” action, the favorite Sunday institution of the “Kids Love Cinema” screenings, continue this year. “, which is enriched this year with the subsection “Fundamentals for Kids”.

“Our museum educators, in the same way that the Fundamentals of Cinema module works, will ‘guide’ the children and help them ‘unlock’ and learn some of the secrets of cinema. This year they will talk to us a lot about the use of sound in cinema,” the artistic director described the first action.

Tomorrow is the official start of the movie season

My fantastic country, a documentary about the mobilizations and protests that broke out in the streets of Santiago, Chile in 2019, opens this year’s film season tomorrow at 18:30 at the Pavlos Zannas hall.

Fifteen minutes later in the ground floor of the Olympia cinema, the screening of Past Lives begins, the debut of Korean-born Celine Song, who stole the show at the Sundance Film Festival and moved audiences and critics with a bittersweet story about love, fate and everything. what determines a person’s personality and course.

Finally, at 20:15 at Pavlos Zannas, Dry Grass is shown, which describes the story of a young teacher who hopes to be appointed in Constantinople, after his mandatory term in a small village. After much waiting, he loses all hope of escape from this dull life. However, Nuray’s colleague helps him revise his perceptions.

“We show selected films aimed at an audience that wants to think a little more about cinema, life, reality, politics, the world, history,” underlined Mr. Andreadakis.

“I am very happy every time the theaters open. Cinema was born in a dark room and only there we can experience the magic”, said the General Director of the Festival Elise Zalando.

Watching in the dark room is a special experience

The President of the Festival referred to the crisis that the viewing process is going through in cinemas and to the removal of the public from them. “But we want to keep the theater alive, finding new ways and functions to bring people into it, as well as ways to enrich the cinema viewing with new ideas, with more interaction and possibly combining other things before and after the film” , characteristically said Eleftheria Thanoulis.

“The small screen is good, the platforms are good, the ease with which we now have access to thousands of films from the entire history of world cinema is good, but the experience of the darkroom is not replaced by anything, because it is a collective experience”, added Mr. Andreadakis.