The 64th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Jonathan Murray

Mainstream feature film production is a type of manufacturing economy, and the global festival circuit constitutes its service-based sibling counterpart. The Thessaloniki International Film Festival, however, seeks to extend classical models of festival organization and ethos. One visible symptom of that fact within the event’s sixty-fourth edition, from November 2–12, 2023, was the number of movies exploring both established and emergent forms of service economy-related human precarity; the latter simultaneously derive from, yet also drive contemporary capitalist cultures around the globe. Thus, while 2023’s offering opened with Trần Anh Hùng’s knowingly genteel celebration of the embryonic gastronomical sector of Auguste Escoffier-era France, it also made a point of closing with Aki Kaurismäki’s portrayal of far more hardscrabble forms of present-day Finnish service-sector employment and existence in Fallen Leaves. Similarly, a majority of the year’s International Competition entries, including writer/director Sofia Exarchou’s Golden Alexander-winning Animal, rooted their narratives within diverse modern-day service economies both real (Animal; Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed; Stergios Paschos’s The Last Taxi Driver) and surreal (Christos Nikou’s Fingernails; Naqqash Khalid’s In Camera). 

The first Greek winner of the Golden Alexander in three decades, Animal benefits notably from a compellingly charismatic, yet uningratiating central performance. Dimitra Vlagkopoulou, joint winner of the Festival’s Best Actress award, plays Kalia, an experienced Greek hotel entertainer whose established annual cycles of hardworking-cum-hard-living seasonal employment within the Mediterranean hospitality sector increasingly threaten to subsume her entire life. Vlagkopoulou, Exarchou, and a consistently excellent ensemble cast convey a clearsighted, yet deeply immersive, sense of the human damage associated with the paradoxical workings of a specific contemporary service economy. Within the latter, the all-consuming, unending goal of the worker is to provide transient and trivial experiences of play for the consumer. Although her situation and story are never reduced to anything remotely resembling reductive political sloganeering, it’s tempting to see Kalia as personifying one contemporary instance of the historic Marxist concept of alienated labor: not for nothing is the hotel she is seen working from during the film’s course named Mirage. 

Indeed, if any kind of character emerged as an archetypal figure within the 2023 International Competition, it was the conflicted contemporary female service-sector employee. The competition’s governing vision of such women was that of individuals struggling to fully define and distinguish between the internal aspirations and external impositions that vie for control over their personal and professional lives. The most tonally ambitious and provocative such protagonist was twentysomething corporate drone Ann—her very name, a deliberately teasing, because untethered, indefinite article—the central character of writer/director Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. Arnow, who won the Festival’s Silver Alexander award for Best Direction and shared the event’s Best Actress prize with Dimitra Vlagkopoulou, crafts a work whose pleasingly deadpan surface belies an ardently sincere refusal to categorize Ann’s life choices and situation in reductive or received ways. Ann’s after-hours investment in the submissive role within a series of dating app enabled BDSM relationships with mostly older men asks searching questions of the viewer. Where, when, and why are we most readily inclined to leap to the conclusion that other people are not simply oppressed, but also complicit in or unaware of that state of being? Such questions proved valuable ones to ask not only in relation to Arnow’s film, but also to many others screened at Thessaloniki this year.

For example, comparably complex central female characters worked hard for the money within other contemporary service-economic contexts explored elsewhere within the International Competition. Greek writer/director Christos Nikou’s first English-language feature, Fingernails, centers around another symbolically named woman. Anna is a person whose palindromic first name reflects her situation as someone pulled in multiple opposing directions all at once: between prioritizing domestic and professional fulfilment; between relationships with a long-term husband and a newly met colleague; and between traditional ideals of romantic attachment as unpredictable and ineffable and the seductive promise of her tech-start-up employer’s invention of a scientifically reliable test that breaks customers’ nails now in order to pre-empt them breaking each other’s hearts later on. Meanwhile, German writer/director Claudia Rorarius’s Touched recalled Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling… in its calmly courageous refusal of knee-jerk diagnoses of exploitative imbalances of power within particular forms of personal and professional relationships. Set within the context of the contemporary social care sector, Touched tells the story of a clandestine workplace relationship conducted by two self-alienated protagonists whose respective malaises are physical as well as psychological: an introverted, obese female home-care nurse and a man struggling to come to terms with his recent accident-incurred paraplegia. Just as Animal figures the contemporary hospitality sector as a codependent admixture of low-paid labor and high-cost leisure, so Touched depicts modern-day social care culture as one within which appropriate forms of self-care and care for others prove equally hard to achieve. 

Although a German film made by a German writer/director, Touched involves significant Greek creative input via the contribution of male lead actor, Stavros Zafeiris. That fact draws attention to another distinctive feature of Thessaloniki’s 2023 International Competition. On one hand, the latter always includes a small number of new Greek features that act as a potential gateway into the festival’s broader offering of indigenous and wider Balkan and Mediterranean cinema—a traditional role fulfilled this year by writer/director Stergios Paschos’s The Last Taxi Driver (which, as its title suggests, offers yet another contemporary service economy-based narrative) and writer/director Christina Ioakeimidi’s Medium. But, on the other hand, no fewer than half of the International Competition’s ten entries involved dominant or significant elements of Greek creative input and as noted above, this year’s Golden Alexander was won by a Greek film and filmmaker. Any report on Thessaloniki’s latest edition therefore needs to explore some of the new Greek work showcased within it. 

Cineaste, for example, took in several indigenous movies over and above those that featured in the International Competition. The year’s two most successful Greek features after the Golden Alexander-winning Animal were striking works in their own respective rights and as a combined illustration of new Greek cinema’s aesthetic, narrative, and thematic variety. Director Eva Nathena’s Murderess won the three separate FIPRESCI, Finos Film, and Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation Awards for Best Greek Film; the Greek Film Center Award for best first-time director of a new Greek feature; and the Fischer Audience Award for Best Film in the festival’s Meet the Neighbors+ Competition section. Murderess exemplifies an intriguing, because locally specific, variant of a well-established, pan-European tradition of critically and culturally prestigious Heritage Cinema. Adapted, as are so many movies of this broad type, from a canonical indigenous literary work (in this case, Alexandros Papadiamantis’s 1903 novel, The Murderess), Nathena’s film also incorporates elements of contemporary Folk Cinema in order to craft an austerely beautiful, borderline monochromatic rural aesthetic and an allegorical narrative of patriarchal ideologies’ remarkable capacity to encourage, then preserve powerfully internalized forms of individual and wider societal self-repression. 

Although illustrative of an ostensibly very different form of contemporary Greek filmmaking, writer/director Zacharias Mavroeidis’s New Queer cinematic metacomedy The Summer with Carmen shares Murderess’s pronounced interest in patriarchal ideologies and their oppressive legacies. Indeed, we might go further yet and identify both movies as indicative of a much wider, narratively and tonally heterogenous tradition of nuclear family-centered films that has featured regularly and prominently within Thessaloniki’s annual selections of new Greek cinema over the past half-decade and more. Whatever the case, Mavroeidis’s work unarguably echoed Murderess in terms of its visibly resonant address to local audiences, winning as it did the festival’s Mermaid Award for Best LGBTQI+-themed feature; the Festival Youth Jury award for Best Film; and the Fischer Audience Award for 2023’s Best Greek film. Moreover, an interest in alternatives to patriarchal prescriptions of interpersonal relationships and wider social structures, and a closely related perception that such alternatives first germinate and grow within the potential nursery that is immediate family life, whether biological or self-created, also palpably shaped another of 2023’s Greek major award-winners, writer/director Alexander Voulgaris’s Polydroso. 

Notwithstanding its pronounced focus on new domestic work, the cumulative scale and curated diversity of Thessaloniki’s 2023 program, which was split into twenty-two distinct strands, offered numerous possible viewing journeys through it. Beyond the International Competition and Greek Film Festival sections, Cineaste concentrated much of our remaining time on the Open Horizons and Special Screening strands. As its name suggests, Open Horizons represents Thessaloniki’s most self-consciously cosmopolitan program section; our selected 2023 highlights from it included movies from Romania (Tudor Giurgiu’s Libertate), Italy (Pietro Castellitto’s Enea), and Argentina (Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents). 

In Libertate, those of us old enough to remember the sensation of watching the Ceauseșcu regime’s December 1989 collapse unfold on live television broadcasts from central Bucharest now get to see what that momentous event might have looked and felt like if shot by a Robert Altman-helmed Outside Broadcast Unit tracking the fog of civil war as it envelops a provincial Romanian town. Enea, meanwhile, is the most amusingly facetious-cum-audacious new Italian feature this correspondent has seen for some time, the work of an emergent director possessed of enough youthful swagger to fancy himself the contemporary inheritor of Paolo Sorrentino’s bravura chronicling of the Babylonian excesses of Italy’s overlapping modern-day metropolitan and mafia elites. Finally, The Delinquents assiduously tunnels its way underneath and around the classical Heist Movie’s generic foundations. The latter’s characteristically sequential focus on elaborate preparation and execution is replaced by a comically extensive exploration of execution’s anticlimactic, extended aftermath. Similarly, the Heist genre’s typical celebration of fantasies of criminal theft is superseded by alternative ones of existential restitution. The film’s bank teller protagonists—yet further examples of the alienated contemporary service sector slaves who populated so many parts of Thessaloniki’s 2023 program—seek not so much to take something which belongs to others as to take back something which others have previously taken from them. The haul they steal from their employer’s vaults is carefully quantified to equate to a set period of monthly salary checks and thus buy a modest form of financially secure early retirement and no more. 

Lastly, Cineaste took in a significant proportion of Thessaloniki’s annual Special Screening strand, which showcases the latest works of established global auteurs. 2023’s offering, for example, included new films from, among others, Victor Erice, Matteo Garrone, Kaouther Ben Hania, Radu Jude, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Alexander Payne, Christian Petzold, Alice Rohrwacher, and Michael Winterbottom. The Special Screenings’ collective emphasis was frequently on momentous contemporary global challenges: rapidly escalating climate emergency in Petzold’s Afire, deliberately unregulated global mass migration in Garrone’s Io Capitano, new forms of damaging East/West divide scarring modern-day Europe in Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Indeed, that shared thematic focus proved so sustained as to also encompass much of the Special Screening section’s ostensibly period-based work. Winterbottom’s Shoshana, for example, underscores the historic responsibility of the director’s native United Kingdom in creating the conditions for the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. Elsewhere, Marco Bellocchio’s sumptuous, Risorgimento-era political melodrama Kidnapped felt uncannily resonant via its exploration of a notorious mid-nineteenth-century Italian instance of state-sponsored, antisemitic hostage-taking. 

Curatorially focused on multiple forms of hard work without ever feeling like hard work itself, Thessaloniki’s sixty-fourcath edition offered productive insights into the state of the contemporary cinematic landscape and cinema’s unique utility as a magnifying lens through which film artists and audiences convene in order to collectively explore and better understand the complexities of early-twenty-first-century economic, social, and cultural life. 

For further information on the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, visit here.

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

Copyright © 2024 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 2