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

Showcase premieres and red-carpet press calls are powerful ways in which film festivals cultivate a sense of occasion and international prestige. Often, though, such hyped bonanza feels disconnected from the actual identities and contents of the wider cinematic events they supposedly advertise. Not so, thankfully, during the sixty-sixth Thessaloniki International Film Festival, held between October 30th and November 9th 2025. Two of its most heavily promoted set pieces were the opening night screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother and festival guest of honor Isabelle Huppert’s appearance in support of her new, stranger-than-fiction dysfunctional family tragicomedy, The Richest Woman in the World. Both movies understand nuclear families as fully fledged narrative and thematic worlds in themselves; both also approach family homes as revelatory spaces, the front doors of which open onto the world outside, rather than shutting the latter out. In both these regards, Huppert’s and Jarmusch’s respective works indicated just how central family-related themes and questions proved to be within this edition of Thessaloniki. 

The festival’s 2025 International Competition Golden Alexander Award for Best Feature was, for example, won by Suzannah Mirghani’s Cotton Queen, a film that blends cultural and commercial ambition in efficient, yet highly engaging ways. On one level, Mirghani’s work is a familiar, feel-good feminist coming-of-age tale: Nafisa, a young Sudanese woman working within her family’s ancestral cotton-picking business, successfully resists her elders’ plans to make an arranged marriage for her. But Cotton Queen’s political project is more distinctive and complex than this reductive plot summary suggests. Mirghani uses Nafisa’s personal situation and story as vehicles through which to even-handedly acknowledge and explore instances of Sudanese accommodation of, as well as activism against, historic British colonialism and a present-day global corporate equivalent (attempts to genetically modify the local cotton crop).

The Competition’s Silver Alexander went to Aristotelis Maragkos’s Beachcomber. Like Cotton Queen and numerous other works across various 2025 program sections, Maragkos’s movie shows how ostensibly intimate family dramas can act as gateways through which we uncover and explore much wider societal histories and legacies. If Cotton Queen derives energy from its optimistic view of contemporary Sudanese feminine agency, Beachcomber attains gravity by ultimately refusing to recuperate traditional Greek models and myths of masculine potency. Central character Elias is an early-middle-aged man wounded as much by his late sailor father’s absence during life as well as since the latter’s death. He attempts not simply to rebuild an abandoned fishing boat but also to become a man like his deceased male parent—or rather, like the physically indestructible, emotionally invulnerable man he imagines in lieu of the person he was prevented from really knowing. Determinedly unromantic, yet visually and tonally atmospheric, Maragkos’s film constructs an unsparing character portrait of a man simultaneously beached, yet all at sea. 

The International Competition’s Best Actor and Best Actress Awards were won by performers in two films that also took complex family politics and dynamics as central thematic preoccupations. Harry Melling won Best Actor for his role in Harry Lighton’s debut feature, Pillion, a British comedy-drama that hooks up raunch (gay male BDSM subculture) with respectability (the sedate surfaces of English middle-class life). Melling’s Colin is a timid, just-about-out young man whose sense of sexual identity evolves radically once he meets, then falls for Ray, a muscular-but-mute older dom male, and is inducted in a wider network of BDSM-practicing men. Pillion, which has enjoyed significant international distribution since showing at Thessaloniki, is something of a first for British cinema. Rather than putting the sub into suburbia, Lighton’s movie instead celebrates the fact that it was always already present there. [See review of Pillion in the Cineaste, Summer 2026 issue.] A highly similar agenda, albeit transposed from an English urban milieu to a Welsh rural one, defined this year’s other British International Competition film. Helen Walsh’s On the Sea tells the story of a middle-aged, married fisherman’s struggle to confront the internalized homophobia that stems from a life lived within a patriarchal culture defined by its historical refusal to acknowledge the presence of sexual diversity within its ostensibly monocultural midst. 

Meanwhile, Sabrina Amali took the Best Actress Award for her performance at the titular protagonist of Greek director Nancy Biniadaki’s Maysoon. Like all the 2025 titles discussed so far, Biniadaki’s work explicitly links its family drama to a larger political equivalent: the film’s narrative hinges on its central character’s mistaken belief that investment in nuclear family bonds (an apparently happy marriage and motherhood in Maysoon’s adopted Germany) offers definitive protection from geopolitical traumas (her previous involvement in anti-government protests in pre-Arab Spring Egypt). Maysoon echoes certain aspects of Cotton Queen: both films’ feminism encompasses native supernatural traditions and phenomena, and exploration of colonial and neocolonial relationships past and present between Africa and Western Europe. 

The family’s centrality as narrative engine and thematic center within the prize-winning quartet discussed above is suggestive of the main overarching preoccupations of the 2025 International Competition. Jaume Claret Muxart’s debut feature, Strange River, is a supernatural coming-out-and-of-age drama: a Catalonian teenager is incrementally separated from his holidaying family in central Europe by a heady first romance with a mysterious youth who may be a spectral being rather than a physical one. If Muxart tells the story of a young man’s self-discovery, another feature debut, Finnish filmmaker Lauri-Matti Parppei’s A Light That Never Goes Out, explores a slightly older one’s reinvention. Forced back to his small-town family home after a major breakdown, twenty-something classical musician Pauli finds unexpected personal and professional renewal through connection with a pair of local amateur improvisational musicians. Elsewhere, Christina Tournatzès’s Karla is a 1960s Munich-set period drama based on the remarkable real-life case of a twelve-year-old girl who courageously faced down societal taboos around sexual abuse of children by bringing a landmark prosecution against her father for his abuse of her. 

On one level, the three Greek-written, -directed, and/or -funded films discussed above— Beachcomber, Maysoon, and Karla—reflect a well-established aspect of Thessaloniki’s International Competition. Every year, it functions as a showcase for and gateway into a wider annual offering of new Greek cinema. But the 2025 International Competition was notable for the unusually large local presence within it: seven out of its twelve films involved Greek settings, finance, and/or authorship. Greek-set and part-funded, Alex Burunova’s Satisfaction skilfully employs elements of the erotic thriller without diluting or otherwise compromising its highly topical examination of women and men’s definitions of sexual consent. Elsewhere, the Greek-part-funded Milk Teeth, mostly set during the dying days of Romania’s Ceaușescu regime, was yet another film that embedded an ostensibly placeless form of family drama (a child’s unexplained disappearance) within a nationally specific cultural and historical context. Meanwhile, Krysianna B. Papadakis and Stergios Dinopoulos’s Bearcave recalled On the Sea in its story of a female couple’s coming out being complicated by the patriarchal mores of the remote Greek mountain village from which they come. Finally, Evi Kalogiropoulou’s Gorgona offered the 2025 Competition’s most genre-driven contribution. Stylized and eroticized to an extensive degree, this dystopian science-fiction depicts a queer female couple’s violent struggle for sexual and social autonomy within the brutal boundaries of an environmentally and ethically polluted future Greek city-state. 

The International Competition’s pervasive focus on family politics and the family as a gateway into political questions more generally defined Cineaste’s wider engagement with Thessaloniki in 2025. Our highlights from the festival’s largest section, the out-of-competition global panorama Open Horizons, included Slovenian filmmaker Urška Djukić’s Little Trouble Girls, another impressive, because politically engaged, coming-of-age drama. Echoing the surreal, sensual summertime haze of Strange River and also of classics of the subgenre such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Virgin Suicides (1999), Djukić succeeds in recreating, yet never exploiting, the highly charged adolescent experience of sexual self-discovery. Meanwhile, Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter’s Belarussian-set White Snail undertakes an analogous analysis of other societal taboos around the human body. A teenage female aspirant model and an older male mortuary worker form an unexpected friendship on the basis of their shared status as social outsiders. Finally in this section, French filmmaker Nathan Ambrosioni’s Out of Love was another morally probing family drama. A middle-aged lesbian woman is compelled to discover (or, perhaps better, define) the precise nature and extent of the responsibilities she bears towards her kin when forced to care for her prepubescent niece and nephew after their mother, her younger sister, abandons them with her. 

Questions of blood and belonging loomed similarly large within another of Thessaloniki’s recurring sections, the Special Screenings program collecting many of the annual festival cycle’s most notable films and filmmakers. Vicky Krieps gives as compelling a performance as any we saw this year in Anna Cazenave Cambet’s Love Me Tender. Krieps’s character, Clémence, is plunged into a years-long struggle for parental access to her beloved son after coming out to her ex-husband. Krieps simultaneously communicates the consistency of Clémence’s defining parental and romantic desires and the cumulative personality changes wrought by extended exposure to both individual and institutional forms of homophobia. Elsewhere in this section, Carla Simón followed up her Berlin Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs (2022) with Romeria, an autofictional work of family history-cum-archaeology whose titular pilgrimage involves a teenage girl’s attempt to break her extended family’s collective pact of silence around her parents’ AIDS-related deaths during her infancy. Finally, another major contemporary European filmmaker, Christian Petzold, also explores the consequences of familial bereavement and secrets in Miroirs No. 3, a characteristically elliptical and enigmatic study of the suspicious, surrogate mother-daughter relationship formed between the survivor of a fatal car accident and the middle-aged widow who inexplicably takes the former in during her recovery. [See review of Miroirs No. 3 in the summer 2026 issue of Cineaste.]

Inevitably, any report on a festival as large as Thessaloniki—its 2025 edition comprised 337 screenings—is an intrinsically partial affair. But this year’s prominence of intimate-yet-outward-looking stories of familial belonging, becoming, and reimagining is suggestive of an event committed to providing audiences with the kind of coherent and considered curatorial through lines necessary to navigate and appreciate one of Europe’s largest and most ambitious film festivals.

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

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

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 3