Thessaloniki Documentary Festival Head on Power of Art to ‘Preserve Reality’ With Truth, Democracy Under Threat

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias As the Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival prepares to host its 27th edition, which runs March 6 – 16, festival director Orestis Andreadakis sees no shortage of threats to truth, freedom and the values on which the democratic order is based. “Four months have passed since the [Thessaloniki Intl.

Film Festival], but it seems like we’re already living in a completely different world — unfortunately, not a better one,” Andreadakis tells Variety.

Likening the times to “a historical documentary about the 1930s, screened backwards,” he describes world events as “an educational documentary that taught us nothing.

It is a testimony for the horror of fascism and totalitarianism that it seems we have forgotten,” he continues. “It is a film record of a horrific historical reality that some are trying to repeat in the worst possible way.” This year’s festival begins hardly a fortnight after Russia’s war in Ukraine marked its three-year anniversary, and as a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza seeking to put an end to that bloody conflict appears in jeopardy.