The Thessaloniki International Film Festival 2019
The Thessaloniki International Film Festival.“Why don’t you go to the “Paralia” (seaside)? It’s very nice there with the film festival; people are happy…”. This, from our friend Trif, who had come to pick us up at the airport in Thessaloniki on our first visit to the city. After a 24+ hour journey, we decided against this treat and hung out at the local “στέκι” (hangout) instead.
We had missed the first film festival, but we have attended every one of them since, and what a treat it has been! “Χαρούμενος” in Greek translates to “happy” but does not perfectly capture the meaning there. At the film festival, “happy” people are walking around with a feeling of excitement and anticipation, toting their cine catalogs, assiduously studying them while waiting to get into the theaters. Bars, cafes and tavernas offer discounts to cine goers. Films from known and obscure, national and international directors are shown all around Thessaloniki. The city throbs with the enthusiasm of the festival goers and of course, parties abound.
“What is a good film and how do we rate it”? This question dominated our discussions as we sipped some Malagousia (Μαλαγουσιά) and nibbled on kolokithokeftedes (κολοκυθόκεφτεδες). The question confronted us every time we had to submit our ratings for the film we just saw. At first we were nonchalant about filling these out, then, in our Greek class, we learnt the history of audience participation. It started with film enthusiasts who were mostly students in the Β Εξώστη (a section of the balcony) vociferously repudiating the politically picked winners and advocating their own choices, eventually winning an official audience reward for best movie. After this, in deference to this hard earned right, we always rated the movies after giving it serious consideration.
Martin Scorsese said in a recent article in The New York Times (on films of the pre-Marvel age) “[A film] was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form”. More than pure entertainment, we saw thought provoking films, films from different countries on different topics that reflect new perspectives, experimental films, cautionary films that won’t let us forget the struggles of peoples around the world.
The festival this year was rich with new discoveries. Our favorite movie was the Colombian director Alejandro Landes’s “Monos”, a film on the difficult topic of child soldiers with brilliant music by Mica Levi and breathtaking cinematography by Jasper Wolf. We had almost written off another one, “Der Kinder Der Toten”, an experimental political satire based on a book of the same name about Austria’s Nazi history until we met one of the directors, the American Kelly Cooper, for a wonderful chat by the seaside over a glass of excellent Xinomavro [Ξινόμαυρο]. What a difference it made when we heard about her husband (and co-director)’s struggles to immigrate from Slovakia, how they were housed in a cow barn during filming and how the book, never translated into English and a particularly hard read, was recorded as it was read piece by piece by the locals!
A common purpose and the general camaraderie present everywhere also made us some new acquaintances. A professor of journalism from Pennsylvania teaching at the university at Thessaloniki for a year with his wife who works with refugees. A student of history studying medicine in the Ottoman times who knows such diverse languages as Greek, Turkish and Arabic, because “How can you teach middle Eastern history without having read the Quran in Arabic”? An amateur movie critic with his wife who invited us over to a lunch in their delightful home and regaled us with stories from his travels.
But most of all, it was a small slice of life with its own rhythm, when we dived head first into the world of films and emerged sometimes dazed, sometimes bewildered, but always enriched.