Welcome to The Edinburgh Greek Festival
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Edinburgh Greek Film Festival
The Edinburgh Greek Film Festival was started a long time ago because a particular Greek (Katy Logotheti-Anderson) and a particular Scot (James McKenzie) could not see why the capital of Scotland should not have what every capital city deserves and some capitals expect: contributions from every citizen community that open up both the existing culture and that of its newer arrivals.
At first there were very few Edinburgh Greeks, so the festival showed something of Greece to Scots who came to learn and, of course, to be entertained. Then Edinburgh started to appear on the mental maps of Greek students, some of whom stayed and then were joined by many others as the Greek Crisis deepened. Now our audiences are an Edinburgh version of everybody, so that when you come to a Festival screening you will enter a conversational whirlpool - everybody talking to everybody else, the kind of thing that happens at Dublin bus stops, Greek cafenia and the dialogues of Plato.
It is one of the magnificences of contemporary Scotland that what it requires of incomers is based on citizenship and not on ethnicity or mere assertions of identity. So conversations happen and our Greek Community acts like a confident, fully fledged citizen body.The films we show enter a multi-voiced dialogue, as honest films should and are usually chosen as a contribution to these conversations. Do we need to mention that everybody is welcome? Not all Greeks are perhaps familiar with the idea of the hundred thousand welcomes. But the rest of us are.