For Greek Documentary Filmmakers, Opportunities Emerge After Years of Crisis

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias For an event that functions as the premier showcase for the Greek documentary industry, the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival again offered a prime platform for local docmakers at its 24th edition, with 77 feature-length and short Greek documentaries screening across the festival’s various competition and non-competitive sections.Marco Gastine, a co-founder of the Hellas Doc Association, a trade group representing the interests of Greek documentary filmmakers, has witnessed the industry’s steady evolution since the association was founded in 2013.“There was nothing specific about documentaries [in Greece’s film policy at the time],” Gastine told Variety in Thessaloniki. “It was underrepresented in the public programs at the Greek Film Center and [public broadcaster] ERT.” The pubcaster was in fact shuttered from 2013 to 2015, as part of cost-cutting measures by an austerity-minded government, plunging the documentary industry into crisis.

Much has changed in the years since, partly thanks to the association’s efforts to shape film policy at public institutions like the GFC and the National Center of Audiovisual Media and Communication (EKOME), the government body tasked with administering Greece’s incentive scheme.The GFC’s current regulations ensure that all of the center’s funding programs are accessible to documentary filmmakers, according to Gastine.

Hellas Doc also lobbied EKOME to revise a cash rebate that was all but inaccessible to documentary filmmakers, who rarely managed to reach the local minimum spend threshold of €100,000 ($110,000).“We succeeded to get them to listen, and they made it €60,000 ($66,000),” said Gastine.