How does one take the temperature of a national cinema? In a year when Greek directors like Yorgos Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari and Alexandro Avranas popped up on the festival circuit with films shot in languages other than their native one, it feels fitting to bet on a homecoming and look for the answer to this elusive question at Greece’s largest and most prestigeous film festival.

Nested by the shores of the Aegean Sea and with a sprawling beach offering clear views of Mount Olympus, Thessaloniki is a city built upon human resilience and the merging of different cultures. The old docks that now house the city’s Museum of Cinema and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival were once one of the first sights of Jewish people escaping the war – a haven for those in search of freedom. As one walks by the harbour in between the festival’s many screenings, it’s hard not to think of art as a tool of empathy and a shared language.

So, despite the festival’s bountiful crop of Greek features this year — 22 in total, spread across many programmes — two sections feel particularly deserving of a proper rummage to get a deeper understanding of the current state of Greek filmmaking: Meet the Neighbors, comprising first or second features from Greece’s neighbourhood of Southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East and >>Film Forward, prodding at the work of filmmakers challenging our reality and the conventions of genre.

Christos Pitharas’s sophomore narrative feature Hunt, and Daniel Bolda’s Maldives centre around the relationship between lonely men and dogs. The former, a tense drama shot in a tight 4:3 ratio, finds hunter Yannis (Yannis Belis) looking for some peace and quiet following the death of his mother and the overwhelming bureaucracy that succeeds it. Instead, he gets a loud next-door neighbour whose neglected dog barks day and night. The latter trails an elementary music teacher in a small mountainside town who begins to question his sanity once the sorrow coming from the disappearance of his beloved dog brings forth eerie visions of the afterlife.

Both films are infused with a stark sense of how loneliness slithers through community as a quiet, treacherous snake. The two men have their meticulously curated routines interrupted by the sudden loss of a last remaining tie to polite society, somewhat finding a twisted, primitive kind of freedom amongst the heaviness of their grief. While Pitharas roots his terse — both in runtime and pacing — thriller in a highly effective, tangible reality that amplifies Yannis’s descent into violence, Bolda taps into magical realism to play with notions of the real and the dreamlike, seesawing between the nostalgic common ground of a classroom and the lawless, uncanny corners of the forest.

If Hunt and Maldives provide fodder for quiet, moving introspection, Christos Massalas’s Killerwood and Alexandros Tsilifonis’s CAFÉ 404 walk in the opposite direction. These two comedies, although starkly differing in tone and earnestness, parody well-established beats: Killerwood takes a stab at both the classic behind-the-scenes mockumentary and true crime soaps and CAFÉ 404 plays with the all-American trope of a night of escalating chaos at a roadside diner.

Massalas’s satire follows a film crew during prep for a thriller investigating a series of unsolved murders in modern-day Athens and strikes just the right dose of sarcasm with a healthy pinch of self-awareness, handing out throwaway digs at how Greek filmmakers worship at the altar of Lanthimos while painting an amusing caricature of the over-preoccupied millennial wannabe auteur. CAFÉ 404 is rougher-around-the-edges, a spoofy action thriller about a young man who, hoping to keep the doors of the titular café open, is dangerously tempted by a mysterious bag.

There’s a sense of playfulness to both films that is welcome even when misguided, their containment allowing for the kind of risk-taking that speaks directly to the joys and possibilities of filmmaking and thus feeds into our opening question. What is Greek cinema looking like these days? Leaving Thessaloniki, the answer is less a definition and more a feeling, and a very good one at that.

The 2024 Thessaloniki International Film Festival ran from 31 Oct to 10 Nov 2024.

There’s no two ways about it: this has been a devastating year for cinemas. At the time of writing, venues across the UK are shuttering for a second national lockdown, leaving workers, audiences and filmmakers out in the cold. Yet while the future of the industry remains uncertain, there have been glimmers of hope on the international festival circuit.

In October the BFI London Film Festival hosted its most accessible and inclusive edition yet, pivoting to a digital-first event for the first time in its long history. Other festivals, from Sheffield to Memphis and Busan to Thessaloniki, have followed suit by forging ahead with virtual programmes and market places.

While the survival of these cultural institutions is testament to the tireless work and perseverance of the organisers and programmers, the vital role they play within the wider film ecosystem has been brought into even sharper focus during this turbulent year. The Thessaloniki Film Festival for example, which runs from 5-15 November, has awarded 3,000 Euros to Greek filmmakers who have debuted their first or second feature at a major international festival such as Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, New York, Tribeca and Toronto, with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Sports.

One of these is Apples by Christos Nikou, which appears in Thessaloniki’s International Competition section having previously screened in Venice. Coincidentally, the film concerns a devastating global pandemic that leaves people with short-term memory loss; to combat this, one man sets about capturing new memories on an old Polaroid camera.

Digger by Georgis Grigorakis and Kala Azar by Janis Rafa are among the other homegrown productions selected for TIFF’s 61st edition. Indeed, the festival’s stated goal this year is to support Greek film production, with an emphasis on young and emerging professionals working across the industry.

Elsewhere in the festival, eight Greek cinematographers are the focus of this year’s Meet the Future initiative, including Giorgos Valsamis, the first Greek DoP to receive two Short Film Palme d’Or awards. Each has created a 60-second spot inspired by Thessaloniki’s core tribute ‘Prophecies from Another World: Sci-Fi and Cli-Fi (1950–1990)’, and these will screen both at the festival and on the festival’s website.

Meanwhile, at the Agora Lab development workshop, guest experts will offer free guidance to Greek filmmakers who currently have a project in the editing stage. There’s also the online Audience Development & Innovation Online Lab, a collaboration between Thessaloniki and Europa Cinemas which aims to provide new ideas and solutions for re-designing the cinema experience in a post-covid world. The long-term effects of this pandemic are difficult to predict, but for now it’s greatly encouraging to see festivals like Thessaloniki striving to safeguard the future of domestic film production.

The 61st Thessaloniki International Film Festival will take place online between 5-15 November. Find out more at filmfestival.gr