Greek Film Festival

The revived Greek Film Festival in New York comes at a time of change in contemporary Greek cinema. Just as the studio era of 1950-70 gave way to the director’s cinema of the post-junta era, that cinema now is giving way to a hybrid cinema that seeks to combine the virtues of its predecessors.

Production in the studio era often hit more than a hundred films a year. That fare was mainly composed of comedies, melodramas, and musicals. The emphasis was on entertainment and performers. Political themes could only be addressed indirectly. On the fringes of this commercial cinema, artistic films such as O Drakos, Magic City, Stella, and The Girl in Black also were produced. Greek actors such as Melina Mercouri and Irene Papas attained international celebrity status and the music of Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis earned Greek bouzouki world acclaim.

The era following the fall of the junta in 1974 shifted emphasis from performers to directors. The artistic vision of the director—a sense that the director is the author of a film—became paramount. Direct expression of political views was now considered one of the natural options open to every director and that option was frequently exercised. The outstanding film of this era is Thiasos (The Traveling Players) and Theo Angelopoulos, its director, embodies the era’s regard for author-directors.

Although numerous films made by various Greek directors often received international recognition, Greek cinema slowly lost its audience within Greece. Just as popular Greek cinema in its final years often seemed no more than visual junk food gone bad, much of the Greek public began to view the director’s cinema as idiosyncratic and pretentious. Half of the roughly twenty Greek films produced in each year of the 1990s had box office attendance of less than 10,000. At the same time, some of the better studio-era films being shown on television were drawing large audiences and a new wave of low-budget independents attracted a respectable number of viewers.

A turning point in contemporary Greek cinema occurred in 2000 with the release of Safe Sex. This spoof on Greek morality that featured personalities from television had over a million admissions. By attracting the largest audience for any film released that year in Greece, including all the Hollywood blockbusters, Safe Sex demonstrated that there remained a huge national appetite for Greek films.

In the years that followed the success of Safe Sex, a new trend began to emerge in Greek film. While the focus remained on the personal vision and style of the director, more attention was increasingly given to themes and formats that appealed to the popular imagination. This change, involving many veteran directors as well as newcomers, has been an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process, and it has remained more intuitive than programmatic. The films being screened at this festival reflect this new trend in Greek cinema. They range from hard-edged dramas to light comedies to surrealistic satires. Some employ cutting-edge technology or the improvisations of low-budget independent films; others rely on tested traditional techniques. Further enriching the festival are three feature-length documentaries that reflect the complexity of Greek culture. They deal with a Greek screenwriter in Hollywood, the Greek baseball team at the 2004 Olympics, and the Holocaust in Greece.