THE EDINBURGH GREEK FILM FESTIVAL 2018

People ask about Greece. How bad are things? Is there hope? Greek films have been so full of The Crisis, we often felt we were inviting you to come and share the sorrows of Greece. Not this year. This year we have Greeks who suffer The Crisis but who are too busy living to think about it all the time. We have the celebratory 1968 by Boulmetis, (of A Touch of Spice), Pantelis Voulgaris’s latest historical epic and lots of Greeks behaving as Greeks do. Greek drivers still drive like charioteers, gentle Greek conversation still sounds like a breach of the peace: Greeks are still Greeks. Come and meet a few.

Friday 30 November

1968 

Tassos Boulmetis • Greece 2018 • Docufiction • 1h 55m ·Digital
Greek with English subtitles • 15
Cast: Ieroklis Michaelidis, Antonis Kafentzopoulos, George Mitsikostas, Stelios Mainas

AEK Athens are in the final of the European Basketball Champions Cup but so unlikely to win that a man strenuously avoiding marriage promises to marry if they do. The buses are empty, the old Olympic Stadium is full and Greece, now under the Colonels, hopes against hope. Boulmetis tells the whole story - AEK’s founding by refugees from K(C)onstantinople and lots of the stories from then on. The old players remember, we relive an extraordinary night and Boulmetis manages the almost impossible – documentary footage with engrossing, human, fictionalised truth.

Followed by a Q&Q with the Director, Tassos Boulmetis

Saturday 1^stDecember

 THE FLEA ΟΨύλλος 

Dimitris Spyrou ·Greece 1990 ·1h 48m ·Digital
Greek with English Subtitles ·Suitable for P6 +
Cast: Pantelis Trivizas, Vasilis Kolovos, Dimitra Hatoupi 

Ilias is an accidental schoolboy rebel. There is no newspaper in his village, so he writes one – every copy by hand. The Village is puzzled, the policeman laughs, his parents don’t see the point, his teacher sees the point but doesn’t like it.Through his eyes we see the village and almost live in it. We eavesdrop on the cafenion, the school, the weaving, dyeing women, the carpenter, the mayor. We get gossip, we almost become insiders.

Happy Birthday

Christos Georgiou •Greece 2018 • 1h 27m ·Digital
Greek with English subtitles •15
Cast: Nefeli Kouri, Dimitris Imellos, Myrto Alikaki, Vasilis Magouliotis. 

Margarita has problems. She’s a teenager, anti-government, has a policeman father and a radical boyfriend and she’s trying to grow up. It’s difficult. Her father seems like a nice guy, even when she sees him through tear gas on demonstrations. Her boyfriend is also trying to grow up but is a work in progress. She has, of course, a Greek mother who sends father and daughter off to where all Greek problems are solved – their village. They manage. Roller skates are involved, horribly jocular singing policemen, several sulks and, in the end, some wisdom. 

Sunday 2^ndDecember 

Too Much Info Clouding Over My Head

Vasilis Christofilakis • Greece 2018 • 1h 46m ·Digital
Greek with English subtitles • 15
Cast:  Vasilis Christofilakis,  Kitty Paitazoglou,  Nikol Drizi.

Vasilis is a director in search of a film. His mother wants him to make a masterpiece, his wife wants him to make his own film and his producer wants him to make something - anything at all. He does his best to accept advice. He can’t. He tries to take orders. He can’t. He’s annoying and gifted – he’s a film-director. He decides to make a film nobody else may want to see. Luckily, we don’t have to see that film. We have this film. All you always wanted to know about directors and now you don’t even have to ask.

Followed by a Q&Q with the Director Vasilis Christofilakis and Producer Eleni Petristi. 

Monday 3^rdDecember

The Last Note ΤοΤελευταίοΣημείωμα

Pantelis Voulgaris • Greece 2017 •1h 57m ·Digital
Greek with English subtitles • 15
Cast: Tasos Dimas,  André Hennicke,  Yorgos Karamalegos 

Pantelis Voulgaris is Greece’s Recording Angel and what he records are the ways individuals suffer when History erupts, as in this true story. It’s 1944. The war is ending, but not for the German garrison of Athens, where hundreds of partisans are imprisoned with the usual Nazi mixture of sadism and missionary madness. A German general is assasinated and reprisals ordered – 200 to be shot, to be selected by sometimes Phillhellenic Germans who now know their prisoners personally. Deals are offered, choices made and 200 men decide how to live their last days. They round up their musical instruments and they dance – to the last note.

Tuesday 4^thDecember

Jamaica 

Andreas Morfonios • Greece 2017 • 1h 38m ·Digital
Greek with English subtitles • 15
Cast:Fanis Mouratidis,  Spiros Papadopoulos, Anna-Maria Papaharalambous, Nikoleta Kotsailisou. 

The old story, apparently. Two brothers, very different. They have to be, otherwise no plot. They are. They have complementary virtues and vices. Women are interested in them unequally; they don’t get on. But things happen, real things. You hear humane (translated) Greek banter, you meet the kind of Greeks you hope really exist, there are gentle, credible love stories going on. It has a real ending. We admit it: this is a feelgood film. But this one makes you feel good about feeling good. 

FESTIVAL EXHIBITION 25 November – 11 December

APPLY WITHIN

Organised by SYN FESTIVAL EDINBURGH Curated by Davide Boschi and Maro Psyrra.

A decade ago the global financial crisis left a prominent mark in Greece by inheriting a debt crisis that torments the country to this day. Many lost their jobs and thousands have left the country in search for a better future. The exhibition reflects on a basic right: the right to work, to be financially independent. It focuses on all those who left their home countries to build a new life in the United Kingdom and explores the numerous challenges faced in the new environment in pursuit of a more stable life.