The 2022 Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Jonathan Murray

The global festival circuit continues to rebuild and festival audiences reconvene following the COVID-19 pandemic. It thus felt fitting and perceptive for the Thessaloniki International Film Festival’s sixty-third edition to program numerous films that explore the moving image’s pleasures, power, and potential in diverse ways. Filmmakers, film works, and filmmaking technologies constituted prominent protagonists and preoccupations within both this edition’s opening (Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans) and closing night (Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage) films. More broadly, cinema’s evolving identities, interests, and impacts also formed a subtle curatorial thread linking together many of the November 2022 edition’s other two hundred and eighty-or-so screenings. Semiautobiographical strains of global art cinema were represented by works such as Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, and Adrián Silvestre and Raphaëlle Pérez’s My Emptiness and I. A post-#MeToo examination of gendered power relations within film industries past and present formed a common project of movies as diverse as Houman Seyyedi’s World War III, Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s Vera, and Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light. Present-day uses of the moving image for oppressive surveillance-related purposes gave films like Maksym Nakonechnyi’s Butterfly Vision and Mikhail Borodin’s Convenience Store notable topical resonance. In these and other ways, Thessaloniki’s sixty-third edition offered a simultaneous celebration and interrogation of contemporary cinematic cultures.

The festival’s 2022 International Competition section saw the Golden Alexander Award for Best Feature Film and the Best Actor Award (for Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez) go to Valentina Maurel’s Costa Rican coming-of-age drama, I Have Electric Dreams. Maurel’s directorial approach, like the ensemble performance style of her lead actors, mixes naturalistic and agitatedly expressive elements. She and her actors thus create engrossing audiovisual and tonal correlatives of the wayward excess of emotional energies that seethe at the heart of a script about a sixteen-year-old girl for whom sexual awakening is complicated by the experience of growing up within a dysfunctional nuclear family.

As well as acknowledging the film’s artistic achievement, the awards won by I Have Electric Dreams also perhaps reflect the centrality of female sexual awakening and/or self-assertion as key themes within this year’s International Competition section as a whole. Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean, for which lead actor Rosy McEwen won the festival’s Best Actress Award, tells the story of a late-1980s British lesbian schoolteacher caught between being conditionally out in her private life while still closeted in her professional equivalent. Carmen Jaquier’s Thunder, which won the festival’s award given by the Greek chapter of Women in Film and Television (WIFT), follows a late-nineteenth-century Swiss teenage nun’s societally frowned-upon investigation of two closely interrelated enigmas: her late sister’s mysterious death and her own unlooked-for birth as a self-consciously sexual being. Claudia Varejão’s Wolf and Dog celebrates the brave self-expression of a young adult queer community living on a present-day Portuguese Atlantic island and, within that collective, the tentative self-exploration and –discovery of the film’s female central character.

Notwithstanding significant divergences in their respective cinematic styles and narrative settings, the latter three films share an impressive sense of psychological and political nuance. Their female lead characters’ journeys toward self-realization are imperfect and/or obstructed, albeit no less meaningful and valuable for that. Moreover, all three works understand the ultimate course and extent of any such individual journey to be determined as much by the terms of the specific world within which the person undertaking it lives as by that person’s reserves of personal courage or enlightenment. When and where we find ourselves influences who we find ourselves to be, or be capable of becoming. These films’ closely overlapping sexual politics privilege projects of empathetic perception as well as ones of idealistic prescription.

Two other 2022 International Competition films emerged as major award winners. Michael Koch’s A Piece of Sky took the Special Jury Silver Alexander award. Set in a remote rural Alpine community, Koch’s film counterpoints social realist subject matter—a local woman’s relationship with an incoming migrant worker is complicated when he is diagnosed with a brain tumor—with a highly stylized visual aesthetic that favors long takes and pathetic fallacy-related metaphors. The immense and implacable Alpine landscape dwarfs all the film’s characters, but to subtly varying tonal and interpretative ends. On one hand, the local community appears ever more small-minded in its lack of sympathy towards a man whose status as an incomer is, to them, as terminal an affliction as his subsequently revealed illness. But, on the other, the film’s female central character’s support of her lover in the face of communal prejudice and the cancer-driven personality changes from which he suffers renders her a quietly immense figure.     

The International Competition’s Bronze Alexander Special Jury Award for Best Director, the FIPRESCI Award for an International Competition film, and the Hellenic Parliament’s Human Values Award were all won by Chie Hayakawa’s Plan 75. A science-fiction thought experiment meticulous and ingenious in equal parts, Hayakawa’s movie imagines a near-future Japan in which present-day demographic trends have delivered a chillingly self-effacing dystopia. Faced with a steadily aging population, the Japanese government creates Plan 75, a state-mandated voluntary mass euthanasia program explicitly targeted at elderly citizens. Hayakawa’s film is noteworthy in the diligent institutional detail of its world-building, the consequent plausibility of its narrative premise and arc, and the careful grounding of its imagined future within contemporary debates around assisted suicide and the socioeconomic challenges posed by aging developed world national populations.    

Thessaloniki’s 2022 International Competition also functioned as a strategic entry point into the festival’s world-leading offering of new Greek cinema. Two domestic features, Christos Passalis’s Silence 6 – 9 and Maria Douza’s Listen, played in both the International Competition and the Greek Film Festival: First Run strand. The choice of these movies as the host nation’s International Competition representatives worked to signal the notable formal and thematic diversity of the wider Greek presence within the festival’s November 2022 edition. Firmly aligned with the art-house end of the spectrum, Silence 6 – 9 recalled not only any number of Greek Weird Wave antecedents but also Plan 75 elsewhere in the International Competition. Where Chie Hayakawa’s movie diligently establishes the detailed logistics of its dystopic parallel universe, however, Christos Passalis’s instead adopts a much more absurdist and elliptical approach. His film’s premise, one that gradually emerges rather than being conventionally established, centers on a small Greek town obsessed with using analogue recording technologies to capture mysterious daily radio broadcasts ostensibly sent by departed members of the community. In contrast, Maria Douza’s Listen is a far more mainstream proposition. Its classical coming-of-age narrative (a deaf teenage girl relocated to live with her semi-estranged father struggles to connect with him, his second family, and her new schoolmates) aligned Douza’s work with I Have Electric Dreams and the other feminist International Competition entries discussed above. 

The other new Greek features Cineaste viewed during our visit to Thessaloniki included Asimina Proedrou’s debut feature, Behind the Haystacks, which proved to be the festival’s most successful Greek film in terms of awards won: a total of four, including co-winner of the Greek Film Centre Award. Proedrou’s film extends much recent Greek cinema’s concern with the European refugee crisis and Greece’s distinctive position in the front line—morally as well as geographically speaking—of that international event. Proedrou’s narrative adopts a tripartite structure partly in order to explore the overlapping consequences for three members of the same nuclear family of a tragedy in which multiple refugees are killed. As well as proving dramatically involving, that structure also allows the director to hint at the mutually informing, concentric circles of sociopolitical hypocrisy (family, small community, national polity, supranational entity) that underpin Greece and the wider European Union’s ongoing inability to adequately respond to contemporary regional and global mass migration. Problematic social attitudes to mass migration and individual migrants also lie at the heart of Spiros Jacovides’s satirical comedy Black Stone, the 2022 Greek Film Centre Award’s other co-winner and also winner of two of Thessaloniki’s annual Audience Awards. An elderly, socially conservative Greek mother struggles to see either the bad in her disappeared civil servant son or the good in the Greek-African taxi driver who altruistically helps her to track her missing child down. Pointedly constructed to appear as if it were a low-budget television documentary project, Black Stone is both entertaining and educative in its consequent suggestion that the domestic social prejudices it depicts are as materially real as they are morally ridiculous.

Another of Thessaloniki’s main attractions relates to the festival’s embrace of a supranational identity and remit alongside its national one: its annual Meet the Neighbors and Balkan Survey strands represent important chances to survey new developments within Balkan, Eastern European, Mediterranean, and Levantine film cultures. 2022 Meet the Neighbors highlights included Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike, winner of the Golden Alexander Award for this specific strand. Set in the present-day Donbas region of Ukraine, the audacious panoramic cinematography and production design of Er Gorbach’s film (set mostly in a farm part-destroyed, then requisitioned by Russian militia) poses searching questions. Most familiarly, these relate to the effects of long-term military conflict on domestic civilian life. More provocatively, however, Klondike also asks whether long-term military conflict might in certain ways come to assume the character of dysfunctional domestic relationships and be normalized and internalized by its participants-cum-victims as a result. Indeed, the Ukraine conflict and wider Ukrainian culture were notable presences across this year’s Meet the Neighbors section, explored in different ways by movies such as Michal Vinik’s Valeria Is Getting Married (winner of Meet the Neighbors’s Silver Alexander Prize), Maksym Nakonechnyi’s Butterfly Vision, and Christina Tynkevych’s How is Katia?

How is Katia? stands out from much recent Ukrainian or Ukrainian-themed cinema in Christina Tynkevych’s decision to focus attention on internal state corruption rather than external state aggression. That said, very similar directorial priorities were visible across parts of Thessalonki’s 2022 Balkan Survey section. Emin Alper’s Burning Days, winner of the Audience Award for a Balkan Survey film, is on one level a briskly efficient, thriller-inflected tale of rural Turkish small-town corruption pitted against an incoming individual representative of law and order. On another level, however, the film functions in national-allegorical terms, pitting the urban, liberal, and idealistic values of its central character, a recently arrived young state prosecutor, against the rural, quasi-feudal, and nepotistic equivalents of the local Establishment with which he finds himself in conflict. The extent to which the prosecutor may lack the full courage of his convictions (a major subplot hints at his closeted sexual identity) offers one contributing explanation for the ultimately pessimistic nature of the film’s narrative resolution.

Equally unsentimental, but much more overtly comic in tone, is Paul Negoescu’s Men of Deeds. That movie’s central character, a divorced Romanian policeman who returns to small-town rurality after failing to forge a career in the city, is a much more obviously tragicomic figure than his equivalent in Burning Days. Downbeat though the latter movie is, the identity and actions of its prosecutor protagonist at least suggest the possibility of an individual life lived in self-willed separation from all-pervading civic corruption. So malformed by long-term exposure to such ambient malfeasance is the central character of Men of Deeds, however, that his belated and reluctant attempts to stand up to it seem self-harming as much as self-defeating. The tonal complexity of Burning Days involves its maintenance of an idealistic element alongside its pessimistic narrative resolution. By contrast, that of a work like Men of Deeds relates to the way in which its ostensibly comic narrative camouflages a borderline misanthropic sense of pessimism that becomes fully apparent only toward the film’s end.

Cineaste viewed a total of forty-eight movies at Thessaloniki’s November 2022 edition. Other highlights for us included (in the festival’s Special Screenings section) Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s semi-autobiographical Forever Young, a no-holds-barred, backstage account of communal life in a mid-1980s French acting school, and Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s superb rural thriller, The Beasts. Needless to say, the list could go on: it is impossible to provide a full account of a festival as extensive and diverse as Thessaloniki within a short report article. What is far easier, however, is to reach the conclusion that Thessaloniki’s November 2022 edition comfortably maintained this event’s premier status on the international festival circuit.

For more information on the festival, click here.

Jonathan Murray, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, teaches film and visual culture at the Edinburgh College of Art.

Copyright © 2023 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2