The Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival wrapped its twenty fifth version with a muted closing night time on Sunday, with competition organizers scrapping an official award ceremony as Greece continues to mourn the lack of 57 lives in a lethal rail accident on Feb. 28.
The awards for this yr’s competition — together with the Golden Alexander, which went to Heba Khaled, Talal Derki and Ali Wajeeh’s “Under the Sky of Damascus” — had been handed out behind closed doorways earlier within the day.
Artistic director Orestis Andreadakis informed Variety previous to the competition’s conclusion, “As an indication of respect, the competition canceled from the very begin all ceremonies and festive occasions. In the identical spirit, it was determined to name off the closing ceremony.”
Many of the awarded filmmakers had been nonetheless available at Thessaloniki’s Olympion cinema on Sunday night time, for the world premiere of “My Pet and Me,” by Dutch documentary filmmaker Johan Kramer.
Andreadakis and competition common director Elise Jalladeau supplied transient closing remarks earlier than the screening, which they stated befell “underneath the shadow of the tragic accident at Tempe, which has stuffed us with unhappiness.” They thanked the filmmakers who took half on this yr’s competition, insisting that “within the darkness of the previous ten days, artwork, movie, documentaries have supplied us the most effective refuge.”
The somber occasion matched the temper of a nation nonetheless reeling within the aftermath of the lethal accident through which a passenger practice carrying 350 folks collided with a freight practice in northern Greece. That grief has remodeled into collective outrage over a tragedy that many say might have been averted.
The head-on collision in northern Greece claimed 57 lives, most of them college college students.
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Speaking on the award ceremony for the competition’s Agora business arm on March 8, business head Angeliki Vergou expressed her “shock, unhappiness and anger” over the lack of life within the deadly head-on collision, through which dozens extra had been injured. Just just a few hundred yards away, 1000’s marched by means of the middle of Thessaloniki in an enormous protest that coincided with a 24-hour common strike and an indication for International Women’s Day. Their largely peaceable protest was met with tear gasoline and stun grenades from riot police.
According to official estimates, 60,000 folks demonstrated throughout Greece final Wednesday, answering a name to motion despatched out by employees unions and scholar teams. Activists and organizers say the precise quantity was a lot larger, as anger throughout the nation has boiled over within the largest show of public protest for the reason that top of the Greek financial disaster a decade in the past.
After initially blaming the deadly accident on “tragic human error,” embattled Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis assumed duty for the collision final week, acknowledging it might have been prevented with correct safeguards in place and promising a radical overhaul of the railway system. Investigations this previous fortnight have detailed persistent neglect, understaffing and underinvestment within the nation’s crumbling rail community, which was privatized in 2017 as a part of a raft of austerity measures imposed on Greece by its European lenders.
The tragedy has galvanized rising discontent amongst a era of younger Greeks raised throughout a debt disaster that decimated the center class and dimmed their prospects of a greater future. Despite a spate of reforms, Greece’s center-right authorities has been hit by a sequence of high-profile scandals in current months, and lots of really feel the tragedy in Tempe is a becoming image of a rustic that has lurched off the rails.
Emotions all through the week ran excessive in Thessaloniki, as lots of the victims had been college college students coming back from a three-day vacation weekend. Director Maria Louka, who with Myrto Patsalidou co-directed the documentary “Grief — Those Who Remain,” which premiered on the competition, famous that the six-hour rail journey from Athens to Thessaloniki is a well-recognized one to lots of the filmmakers and festival-goers in attendance.
Protesters have directed their outrage towards embattled Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis
NurPhoto by way of Getty Images
“We have executed it many instances and had it in our thoughts as a protected and nice expertise. If I didn’t have a really younger child, I’d have gone to the competition by practice, as I did final yr,” Louka informed Variety. “So to lose so many individuals like that brought on unbelievable unhappiness and anger. That feeling was pervasive [at the film’s premiere].”
The directing duo’s shifting and well timed documentary follows the dad and mom who had been left to grieve within the wake of three brutal murders that shocked Greece within the 2010s, claiming the lives of the younger Pakistani immigrant Shahzad Luqman, the anti-fascist hip-hop artist Pavlos Fyssas and the LGBTQ activist and drag performer Zak Kostopoulos. As with final month’s deadly practice accident, these killings sparked widespread protests throughout the nation.
Magda Fyssa, the mom of the slain rapper who glided by the stage identify of Killah P, gave an emotional speech after the film’s premiere, describing how “all of Greece is mourning once more from legal acts.” “We have misplaced our youngsters, we now have misplaced a era, we now have misplaced our future,” she stated.
Speaking to a hushed auditorium, Fyssa described the painful, solitary journey of a mom mourning the sudden lack of her son. “It’s these moments once you’re alone, you’re with the ideas of your youngster who by no means leaves your thoughts all day lengthy. You can do 1,002 issues, however half your ideas are with the kid you may’t see, who’s left you. And the opposite half is with the household who stays,” she stated. “I’m considering of the opposite dad and mom at this second, who’re all of a sudden in the identical place that we’re. And how a lot ache — how insufferable is the burden they carry.”
After the screening, many within the viewers had been overcome with emotion, stated Louka. As the mourning households took to the stage, they had been met with a standing ovation. “They spoke with tenderness and solidarity for the dad and mom who are actually grieving their very own youngsters,” she stated. “There was uncooked and trustworthy emotion.”
The director nonetheless stated it was “liberating” to share that ache with an viewers additionally grappling with its collective sorrow. “The consciousness of the fragility of our lives, the traumas, the ache will be alleviated after they turn into a matter of group, when folks don’t really feel alone. This is what our movie exhibits to a sure extent, that is what I felt at its premiere,” she stated.
As tens of 1000’s once more took to the streets throughout Greece on Sunday, Andreadakis informed Variety, “Our nation was marked by a horrible accident and our lives modified. However, artwork, movies and documentaries are at all times the most effective refuge in such moments.”
The competition director stated that “documentary filmmaking is deeply political on each degree, and it urges us to turn into acutely aware residents.” In the wake of the current tragedy, he added that he needed “to encourage the documentary group to make use of their artwork to search out that means, to present us hope.”
Listed beneath are the primary winners of the twenty fifth Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. The full checklist will be discovered right here:
International Competition Awards
Golden Alexander: “Under the Sky of Damascus,” by Heba Khaled, Talal Derki, Ali Wajeeh
Silver Alexander: “Who I Am Not,” by Tünde Skovrán
Jury Special Mention: “Narrow Path to Happiness,” by Kata Oláh
Newcomers Competition Awards
Golden Alexander “Dimitri Eipides” Award: “The Voice,” by Dominika Montean-Pańków
Silver Alexander: “In the Sky of Nothingness with the Least,” by Christos Adrianopoulos
Jury Special Mention: “Ladies in Waiting,” by Ioanna Tsoucala
Film Forward Competition Awards
Golden Alexander: “Blue Bag Life,” by Alex Fry, Rebecca Lloyd Evans, Lisa Selby
Silver Alexander: “Dogwatch,” by Gregoris Rentis
FIPRESCI Awards
Best Documentary of the International Competition: “I Like It Here,” by Ralph Arlyck
Best Greek Film within the International Program: “Kristos, the Last Child,” by Giulia Amati
