Panorama, an antidote to crisis

“The only antidote to film is… more film”

Frank Capra

It’s been 24 years since the Panorama of European Cinema first appeared in Athens, aiming at introducing the Greek audience to contemporary European cinema and to filmmakers who created and founded cinematic language without, however, ignoring the rest of the film production and its history. We continue our efforts today along the same line despite the financial and various other difficulties that we go through as a nation; I believe that, with the help of cultural events like our festival, we can offer a strong spiritual antidote to the crisis.

At the forefront, as always, there is contemporary European cinema at the competition section with films that have not yet been bought by a Greek distributor. Among these, let me mention the amazing, poetic, free-flowing “Mysteries of Lisbon”, directed by Raoul Ruiz, whose recent death, at the age of 70, deprived European cinema (where he worked since he left his homeland Chile as a refugee) of a great and original creator. In the competition section, there is also a film from Cannes film festival, the political “Pater”, directed by the French Alain Cavalier. Cavalier made his debut in 1962 (“Le Combat dans l’île”) in the nouvelle vague era and continued his career pursuing a lonely –but always interesting- road. From Poland comes “Suicide Room” by Jan Komasa, dealing with a teenager boy whose computer obsession leads him into a dangerous dead end. Among the young directors of the competition section are the Russian Igor Voloshin with “Bedouin”, recounting a woman’s drama while her young child dies of cancer, the British Ben Whitley with his dark thriller “Kill List” and the Turk Tayfun Pirselimoglu with the Greek-Turkish production “Hair”. 

In the “World Cinema Premieres” section of the 24^th Panorama, comes the awarded (Grand Prize of the Jury – Cannes film festival) Turkish film “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Taking as a starting point the search for the grave of a murdered man by a group of people, Ceylan manages to create a phenomenal, visually mesmerizing film about corruption but also expanding on the political and social situation in contemporary Turkey. Furthemore, there is the American “Help” by Tate Taylor, offering a touching dramatic image that has as a background the battle for human rights that shook America in the 1960s, the British “Jane Eyre”, a new take on the classic novel by Charlotte Brontë directed by Cary Fukunaga, with Michael Fassbender as a protagonist (awarded at the recent Venice film festival for the film “Shame”). The famed German Tom Tykwer participates with the film “3” that portrays a couple in their forties that falls in love with the same man, while Marius Holst is represented with the film “King of Devil’s Island” focusing on the uprising of delinquent boys living in an inhuman prison located on a Norwegian island. Finally, two Greek films also premiere in the festival: Zaharias Mavroeidis’ “The Guide”, Marina Danezi’s “Scavengers’ Union” and George Fourtounis’ short film “Head Down” that was recently awarded at the Drama film festival.

Last year, with reference to the 100 years since the birth of Samuel Fuller, the Panorama screened the first part of the tribute to the American director. This year, the second part will be presented with some of the classic masterpieces of this unique -yet underestimated for a long time- filmmaker: “Pickpocket on South Street”, “Naked Kiss”, “Run of the Arrow”, “House of Bamboo”, as well as three films that were never officially screened in Greece: “Shock Corridor”, “The Crimson Kimono” and “Park Row”.

Two further tributes are included in the programme. The first one is dedicated to the films that Katina Paxinou filmed abroad: Sam Wood’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, Luchino Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers”, Orson Welles’ “Mr. Arkandin”, and the British gothic thriller “Uncle Silas” by Charles Frank, that hasn’t been screened in Greece since 1947, the year it was filmed. The second tribute is to the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, with four classic and unique films: "Ran", “Seven Samurai”, “Red Beard” and “Dodes’ka-den”.

As in previous years, we show our constant interest in Greek cinema; this time, in the form of a great tribute to the films that were produced in the 1990s. With these films, the directors contributed, along with other established directors of the time (Angelopoulos, Damianos, Kakogiannis, Koundouros) in the broadening of the horizons of Greek cinema: Nikos Panayiotopoulos, Vasilis Vafeas, Stavros Tsiolis, Dimos Avdeliodis, Nikos Grammatikos, Antonis Kokkinos, Sotiris Goritsas, Vasiliki Antoniou, Dimitris Panayotatos, Vasilis Mazomenos. While, on the occasion of his award, the satirical comedy “Loaf and Camouflage” by Nicos Perakis will also be screened.

Finally, as in every year, there is always space for short films, as the 14 finalists of the European Film Academy awards (2010) demonstrate.

Ninos Fenek Mikelides

Programme Director