The Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Jonathan Murray

Given events of the past two years, it felt fitting that the sixty-second Thessaloniki International Film Festival’s special tribute section focused on film editing. That cinematic craft’s navigation of the challenges posed by acts of rupture and the possibilities associated with ones of suture offers an apt metaphor for the current situation of this (and just about any other) film festival. It is therefore too prosaic simply to state that Thessaloniki’s latest edition took place between November 4th and 14th, 2021. Better instead to acknowledge and celebrate the festival’s simultaneous emergence from and evolution through the COVID-19 pandemic. Emergence took the form of a scrupulously well-managed full programme of cinema screenings, while evolution saw the festival also deliver the majority of its offerings online. The latter move enhances the logistical and financial accessibility of what has always been a notably welcoming and navigable top-tier film cultural and industrial event. What Thessaloniki contrived to offer in November 2021 was the pleasure of business as usual conjoined with an advance preview of the state of things to come.

As in the pre-COVID era, the 2021 program proved both wide-ranging and extensive. Of the 2021 edition’s fourteen central programming strands, Cineaste concentrated its attention on the International Competition, Meet the Neighbors, Balkan Survey, and Special Screenings strands of the festival. The International Competition’s Golden Alexander Award for Best Feature and the Best Actor Award went to Samuel Theis’s Softie and that film’s lead performer, Aliocha Reinert. Softie’s naturalistic aesthetic form and story arc should not distract attention from the film’s remarkable emotional courage and ethical self-awareness in narrating its story of a prepubescent, queer, working-class child’s burgeoning attraction toward their supportive but unaware straight, middle-class schoolteacher. In calmly refusing to sensationalize either its protagonists or plot, Softie offers a humanistic foregrounding of the experience of figures who embody various forms of social and sexual difference without ever seeking to fetishize these.

A comparable political project assumes significantly different aesthetic and narrative form in the International Competition’s Silver Alexander Special Jury Award-winner, Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Clara Sola. Members of the titular central character’s rural Costa Rican family and wider community view her corporeal difference—she suffers from a congenital spinal condition—as religiously significant, acclaiming her as a savant healer of others while preventing her from accessing professional medical treatment herself. Those around Clara fetishize her twice over, associating her with extraordinary spiritual powers she may not possess while dissociating her from everyday sexual needs that she definitely does. In contrast to Samuel Theis’s deliberately low-key approach in Softie, Álvarez Mesén resolves her narrative in pointedly magical-realist fashion: in the film’s final moments, the mystical beliefs previously seen to oppress Clara belatedly open up her path to a movingly extreme form of self-determination.

The International Competition’s final major prize-winner was Lorenzo Vigas’s The Box, which took the Bronze Alexander Special Jury Award for Best Director. The central narrative focus of Vigas’s movie closely resembles that of Softie: the complex relationship between a male child and the accidental father figure onto which that child pins a range of unsustainable hopes. Hatzin, a Mexican teenager, collects his long-lost father’s recently discovered remains only to immediately encounter a man who physically resembles his dead parent. Determined to believe that he was not in fact bereaved, Hatzin finds himself drawn into a web of corporate corruption of a kind that may itself have been the root cause of his own family’s loss years before. The Box works equally well as relationship drama, slow-burning thriller, and political allegory. In Vigas’s hands, Hatzin’s determination to discern a guiding paternalistic presence within his life, no matter what the personal cost, becomes an ingenious narrative vehicle through which to explicate and explore the murky labor politics of modern-day Mexico.

Thessaloniki’s International Competition always showcases a genuinely cosmopolitan program, with work this year drawn from Latin and South Americas, all parts of Europe, and East Asia. At the same time, however, the Competition also offers a useful entry point into the festival’s annual offering of new Greek cinema. In 2021, three domestic features premiered simultaneously in the International Competition and Greek First Run festival strands. Perhaps the most ambitious of the three was Araceli Lemos’s Holy Emy, which broke new representational ground in its focus on the experiences and identities of the contemporary Greek Filipino Christian community. On one hand, Lemos’s movie shares Clara Sola’s magical-realist-inflected interest in traditional faith healing and ritual beliefs. On the other, however, it also recalls The Box’s ability to function as both intimate two-hander and suggestive national-cultural commentary. The two adolescent sisters at Holy Emy’s heart are unable to fully comprehend or control their young bodies’ still-developing capacities or to foresee the personal roads down which physical maturation may take them. The film appears to suggest that first-generation immigrant experience per se may be partially explicable in closely related terms.

Another entry in the International Competition’s Greek thread, Jacqueline Lentzou’s Moon, 66 Questions, saw lead performer Sofia Kokkali win the 2021 Festival’s Best Actress award. In contrast to International Competition peers such as Softie, Clara Sola, and The Box, Lentzou’s film narrates a story of successful parent-child reconciliation: an estranged young adult daughter gradually reconnects with her father through the need to provide care for him after a serious illness. While the notable acting skill of Kokkali and co-lead Lazaros Georgakopoulos provide Moon, 66 Questions with its emotional impact, the performers themselves benefit from writer/director Lentzou’s idiosyncratic approach to narrative structure and chronology. Wilfully episodic, Moon, 66 Questions approaches processes of reconciliation between two people, and the individual self-reflection and –realization that facilitate these, as phenomena that develop in fits and starts and by associative as much as strictly causal or logical means.

Yet, impressive new Greek cinema was not the sole preserve of the 2021 International Competition. Premiering in the festival’s Film Forward strand, for example, Yorgos Goussis’s low-budget digital debut feature, Magnetic Fields, won the most prizes (six in all) of any entry in the 2021 event. A part-improvised, island-based road movie, the title of Goussis’s film neatly glosses the work’s open-hearted yet clear-eyed perspective on the workings of interpersonal relationships. Often, Goussis appears to suggest, the experience of powerful attraction toward a new acquaintance springs at least in part from a person’s increasing sense of repulsion toward longer-established personal connections within their life. Notwithstanding modest production values, Magnetic Fields’s psychological acuity allows it to function as a road movie par excellence, a story about two people driven toward one thing by their need to distance themselves from another.

Indeed, the road movie functioned as a fertile generic template for multiple new Greek films in this year’s festival: more mainstream works like Stelios Kammitsis’s The Man with the Answers and Nana Neul’s Daughters also assumed road movie form. Elsewhere in the program, Yianna Americanou’s .dog, another individual contribution to the 2021 program’s recurring interest in dysfunctional parent-child relationships, premiered across Thessaloniki’s Meet the Neighbors and Greek Film Festival First Run strands. Americanou’s movie sits far closer to the commercially conventional pole of new Greek cinema represented by films like The Man with the Answers than it does to the experimental one exemplified by low-budget digital works such as Magnetic Fields and Athens-based conceptual art and performance art duo FTYA’s Orfeas2021, billed as the first queer Greek opera. The overall impression any visitor would have left Thessaloniki with this year is, therefore, like that created by other recent festival editions: as well as sustaining notably high levels of domestic feature film production (no fewer than twenty domestic features premiered at this year’s festival), new Greek cinema is a remarkably diverse entity in aesthetic, narrative, and thematic terms.

As well as clearly fulfilling an important national remit, however, Thessaloniki’s distinctive festival identity also involves its analogous embrace of a wider regional agenda. There are few, if any, better events at which to experience and assess a diverse range of Balkan, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern national cinemas and the abundant co-production activity through which these converse with, interrogate, and sustain each other. For this reason, the festival’s Meet the Neighbors is a competitive strand second in prominence only to the International Competition. Laura Samani’s Small Body, which won the strand’s Golden Alexander award, comprehensively reimagines the possibilities of period drama via a self-confident and ingeniously executed fusion of preindustrial folk cultural belief systems and twenty-first-century queer sexual politics. The film’s narrative premise (a bereaved mother travels across rural late-nineteenth-century Italy in search of a miraculous resurrection of her stillborn child) and cleverly concealed final-act plot twist firmly align it with the wealth of 2021 Thessaloniki films that explore complex parent-child relationship dynamics. A closely related reframing of rural folk culture through a present-day feminist perspective also animated another highlight of this year’s Meet the Neighbors offering, Juja Dobrachkous’s impressive debut feature, Bebia, à mon seul désir.

Meet the Neighbors’s sibling strand, Thessaloniki’s annual Balkan Survey, also had much to commend it in 2021. Like several of the other titles discussed here, Milica Τomović’s Celts, which won Thessaloniki’s 2021 Mermaid Award for best LGBTQI+-themed feature, refracts distinctive national-historical subject matter through the narrative lens of intimate interpersonal drama. Τomović’s work depicts-cum-deconstructs the extended and chaotic 1990s dissolution of the former state of Yugoslavia via the metaphor of a stimulant-fueled family party—soft drinks for the children, soft drugs for the adults—during which generational, gender-based, and sexual difference fractures old relationships and forms new ones with dizzying, blackly comedic unpredictability. Also of note was this year’s Balkan Survey Audience Award-winner, Blerta Basholli’s Hive. Like Celts, Hive interrogates the tragic capacity of the various 1990s Balkans War to permeate all aspects of everyday familial identity and interchange within the current and former nation states across which it played out. If Celts portrays that process’s early stages on the eve of one such conflict, Hive contends that it lives on decades after another’s notional end. Yet, if Τomović and Basholli’s works share a sobering historical analysis, both films also articulate a defiantly humanistic and humorous sensibility that will appeal across a range of international markets.

Finally, when Cineaste was not gorging on the banquet of national and wider regional cinematic fare that Thessaloniki laid on in 2021, we found time to drink deep from one of the festival’s most reliable traditional pleasures, its Special Screenings program. Thessaloniki’s international circuit clout and calendrical positioning make it an excellent opportunity to take in an impressively comprehensive selection of recent major festival hits and new work from established directorial voices. In 2021, for example, the Special Screenings strand, which includes the festival’s Opening and Closing films, allowed us to view the latest movies from, among others, Jacques Audiard (Paris, 13th District), Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog), Terence Davies (Benediction), Audrey Diwan (Happening), Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car), and François Ozon (Everything Went Fine).

A report article on the scale of the present one will never do full justice to a festival of Thessaloniki’s maturity and diversity. That pleasurable problem only deepens because of the festival’s successful development, post-COVID, of a twin-track operating model that simultaneously delivers its program in auditoria and online, thereby increasing the number of titles that it is logistically possible to take in while attending Greece’s premier film festival. It would be eminently possible for Cineaste to write an equally extensive alternative account of the 2021 edition that focused on the remainder of the forty-six features that we saw but lack space to discuss here. This fact underscores the extent to which Thessaloniki has emerged from a global pandemic with its longstanding health significantly enhanced, rather than merely unscathed.

For information on the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, click here.

Jonathan Murray teaches film and visual culture at the Edinburgh College of Art.

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 2