Orestis Andreadakis: Last News

Christopher Vourlias The Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival wrapped its 25th edition with a muted closing night on Sunday, with festival organizers scrapping an official award ceremony as Greece continues to mourn the loss of 57 lives in a deadly rail accident on Feb. 28. The awards for this year’s festival — including the Golden Alexander, which went to Heba Khaled, Talal Derki and Ali Wajeeh’s “Under the Sky of Damascus” — were handed out behind closed doors earlier in the day. Artistic director Orestis Andreadakis told Variety prior to the festival’s conclusion, “As a sign of respect, the festival canceled from the very start all ceremonies and festive events. In the same spirit, it was decided to call off the closing ceremony.”

Greece’s Thessaloniki International Film Festival returns this evening for its 64th edition with a screening of The Pot-au-Feu (The Taste of Things), the latest film by French-Vietnamese director Trần Anh Hùng. 

Christopher Vourlias The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival kicks off its 25th edition Thursday at a time when the nonfiction genre has arguably reached unprecedented heights. This year’s festival, which takes place March 2 – 12 in the seaside Mediterranean city, unfolds just days after veteran French docmaker Nicolas Philibert won the Golden Bear in Berlin for his documentary about a Paris mental health care facility, “On the Adamant.” The award capped a fortnight in which Sean Penn’s gonzo doc about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “Superpower,” also generated plenty of buzz (albeit lukewarm reviews). Meanwhile, Cameroon’s Cyrielle Raingou took home Rotterdam’s Tiger Award just a few weeks earlier for “Le Spectre de Boko Haram,” a riveting view of terrorism seen through children’s eyes. And one summer ago, Laura Poitras triumphed on the Lido with “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” her docu-portrait of the photographer and activist Nan Goldin, which won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion award.

Orestis Andreadakis, director of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, has a lot on his mind when he sits down with Deadline via Zoom from his office in Athens. Climate change, women’s rights, and the war in Ukraine are all topics he discussed, and he believes film festivals, including his own, must find a way to address and interrogate wider social issues. 

Christopher Vourlias It had been nearly three decades since a film was last screened in Ciné Apollon, an open-air theater in the resort town of Edipsos on the north shore of the Greek island of Evia. But the arrival of several hundred moviegoers on June 15 for a screening of French filmmaker Coline Serreau’s “La Belle Verte” (The Green Planet) offered a much-needed sense of rebirth: for the cinema, and for an island that was devastated by catastrophic wildfires last summer.As part of wide-ranging efforts to revitalize struggling communities and give a boost to the local economy, the organizers of the Thessaloniki Film Festival this year launched the Evia Film Project, a five-day event that underscores the perils of climate change and offers the film industry a chance to explore the possibilities of green film production.

Christopher Vourlias Thessaloniki Film Festival director Orestis Andreadakis was on summer vacation last August when he got a call from Stavros Benos, the head of the newly appointed National Reconstruction Committee, which was tasked with responding to a series of devastating wildfires that had recently swept across the island of Evia.Just weeks before, Greece’s second-largest island had been a densely wooded paradise famous for its production of honey and resin. But nearly a third of Evia was reduced to ash and cinders during a scorching summer that saw an estimated 300,000 acres of forest and bushland incinerated by wildfires across Greece, as soaring temperatures hit a record high of 115.3 degrees.Benos was calling the festival topper with a plea.

Christopher Vourlias Under different circumstances, the 24th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival might have been a more celebratory affair, with coronavirus restrictions gradually loosening across Greece and the country’s second city hosting an in-person edition of a festival that was among the world’s first to go virtual at the start of the pandemic in 2020.But with the humanitarian toll rising in Ukraine, as Russia continues its relentless assault of its Eastern European neighbor, festival director Orestis Andreadakis offered a sobering reflection on the eve of opening night on war, cinema and the need for solidarity.“It’s shocking what is happening,” Andreadakis told Variety, likening the threat to the one faced by Europe during World War II. “After the war, we had this slogan: Never again.

Christopher Vourlias When the curtain rises Thursday on the 62nd edition of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, it will be a long-awaited return to form for one of the oldest fests on the circuit, after a surge in COVID-19 cases last fall forced the organizers to pivot from a hybrid to a fully online edition.Attempting to sum up his feelings on the eve of opening night, festival director Orestis Andreadakis was gripped by emotion, using words like “strange,” “happy” and “anxious” in the same breath.“It’s as if you go out from the hospital, this period of pandemic, and you don’t know how to speak to your friends, you don’t know how to be in love again, you don’t know how to speak with your relatives and parents and children,” Andreadakis tells

Christopher Vourlias One year after the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival was among the world’s first industry events to pivot to an online edition because of the coronavirus pandemic, planning for the 2021 follow-up “has been feverish, to say the least,” says festival director Orestis Andreadakis.But with open-air cinemas across Greece reopening this spring, and life in this sun-splashed Mediterranean nation—as it is elsewhere in Europe and some parts of the world—beginning to return to something like normal, the timing couldn’t have been better to raise the curtain on the festival’s 23rd edition.“It was a painstaking task worthy of every effort as a physical festival, a festival with actual audience watching films in actual cinemas on a

Christopher Vourlias With days to spare before the opening night of this year’s Thessaloniki Intl. Film Festival, organizers were suddenly forced to contend with a dramatic spike in coronavirus cases in Greece’s second city, prompting them to scrap plans for a hybrid edition and move entirely online.The sudden reversal, said festival director Orestis Andreadakis, was “really, really difficult,” but not entirely unforeseen, as the country grapples with a second wave of COVID-19 that has far outpaced the first wave in the spring.