The 14th Annual Greek Film Festival opens in next month, showcasing an array of award winning Greek films and filmmakers to take audiences from comedy to tragedy and features Greece’s latest blockbuster, Sirens of the Aegean. The two-week festival, starting Wednesday September 13th, will again take place at Palace Norton Street Cinemas, and will feature four strands of film with over 20 feature length films, including contemporary Greek cinema, documentaries, Greek Cinema classics and a retros...

Greek box office blitzer to open the Greek Film FestivalThe Greek Film Festival of Sydney will open on September 8 at Palace Norton Street, Leichhardt with the Greek box office hit ‘Brides’, director by Pantelis Voulgaris with executive producer Martin Scorsese. Brides, winner of 10 awards at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival including Best Feature Film, is a bittersweet love story set against the tribulations of a 1922 Atlantic crossing of 700 proxy brides, aboard the SS King Ale...

Angelopoulos and Demopoulos Dismissed from ThessalonikiMichel Demopoulos, the Thessaloniki fest director, has been removed from his job. Filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos was dismissed as president of the festival. Both had established the Thessaloniki International Film Festival (in November) as one of the major European events. As the Greek Deputy Minister of Culture, Petros Tatoulis, announced yesterday, April 1st, the producer Despina Mouzaki will take over the festival as director, while filmmake...

Thessaloniki’s film festival has a long history, stretching back to 1960, in the golden age of Greek film. Starting as a platform for local cinema, the festival hit a crisis in the 1980s when production levels hit rock bottom – around ten films a year, down from a peak of 100 to 120 films a year in the 60s and early 70s. Michel Demopoulos, then a critic and managing international film acquisitions for state-run Greek TV, proposed a new direction for the festival based on showcasing the best ...

The 45th Thessaloniki International Film Festival wrapped up on Sunday 28 November, with its awards ceremony dishing out its main prize of the Golden Alexander to Mohsen Amiryousefi’s Bitter Dream from Iran. The competition is restricted to the first three features of directors, and the festival has shunned the so-called Class A festival status, which imposes restrictions on competitive events to give it more flexibility in its selection, part of a philosophy that makes the event popular with ...

"Michel Demopoulos has given the Festival a new vitality, opening it up to a young audience. During the Festival, in this town, you breathe not oxygen but cinema!" Bernardo Bertolucci Some history about the festival: First held in 1960 as a modest "Week of Greek Cinema", the Thessaloniki International Film Festival has become, 43 years later, an annual event focused on the discovery and promotion of new directors from all over the world; a true celebration of film. For t...