Just before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, at the end of the Cold War. Everything is changing in front of Anthi’s eyes and Christos seems to be changing too. Bella is the story of a moment in time recreated as if in a feverish dream where fiction and documentary overlap perfectly, creating a striking and emotional cinematographic universe.
January 1953: On the eve of his death Stalin finds himself yet another imaginary enemy: Jewish doctors. He organizes the most violent anti-Semitic campaign ever launched in the USSR, by fabricating the "Doctors' Plot," whereby doctors are charged with conspiring to murder the highest dignitaries of the Soviet Regime. Still unknown and untold, this conspiracy underlines the climax of a political scheme successfully masterminded by Stalin to turn the Jews into the new enemies of the people. It reveals his extreme paranoia and his compulsion to manipulate those around him. The children and friends of the main victims recount for the first time their experience and their distress related to these nightmarish events.
An ailing Greek man attempts to take a young, illegal Albanian immigrant home.
Following the wedding of his daughter, stone-faced beekeeper Spyros makes an annual journey from the north of Greece to the south, traveling along with his hives. En route, he meets an erratic, young female drifter, with whom he strikes up an unusual, self-destructive relationship.
Revenge is a recurrent theme in thrillers, usually dispensed by action heroes with a well-stocked arsenal. But in Yorgos Tsemberopoulos’s nuanced moral maze the protagonist is the bookish Kostas (Manolis Mavromatakis), a suburban florist well versed in social and political theory, which he discusses at length with a local publican. But when his home is invaded by masked hoodlums, who bind his family and rape his teenage daughter, our everyman hero finds his intellectual stance untenable. Encouraged by his paranoid, militarist neighbour, Kostas decides to take the law into his own hands, and in doing so begins to understand – for the first time – the world he has been living in. The vigilante movie is a well-explored genre too, but Tsemberopoulos gives it a whole new urgency, subverting the cliched right-wing fantasy structure and seeing it through the eyes of a man who comes to find his real self while trying to live up to the (imagined) expectations of others. (Source: LFF programme)
The first part of an incomplete trilogy telling the story of the greek people. The film begins in 1919, with Greek immigrants from Odessa arriving near Thessaloniki. Led by the charismatic Spyros, they establish a new settlement in the delta of a river. The youngest of the settlers are Spyros' son Alexis and an orphan from Odessa, Eleni. A strong, almost incestuous affection develops between the teenagers, resulting in twins who are given to a foster family. Also standing in the way of love is Spyros, determined to take his foster daughter as his wife. The lovers then decide to flee the village, persecuted by their father, leading a life of exile. As Alexis joins a group of musicians planning to go to the United States, Eleni regains custody of the twins. Angelopoulos, as in previous films, looks at the sacrifice of civilians confronted by the workers' demonstrations of 1935, the rule of Metaxas' fascist junta and forced emigration to America, and finally the civil war of 1944-1949.
A group of young boys must decide whether to buy a TV set to watch the launch of Apollo 11 or visit Uranya to learn about the secrets of love.
The stakes couldn't be higher for displaced Palestinian refugees Chatila and Reda in this knife-edge drama. The cousins are saving to pay for fake passports to get out of Athens, but when Reda loses their hard-earned cash to his drug addiction, Chatila hatches an extreme plan to pose as smugglers in an attempt to get them out of their desperate situation before it is too late.
Anna has lost her memory but she hasn’t forgotten how to cook. One night she shows up in a working-class neighborhood. There she meets Roula and gets a job as a cook and a place to stay at his shabby seaside tavern. In the kitchen, amidst the scents of spices and old forgotten recipes, Anna struggles to rebuild her past. Her simple but delicious food awakens memories for the regulars who in turn help her to reconnect with herself. The story takes an unexpected turn when Roula suddenly stumbles upon the Green Sea and discovers Anna’s true identity.
An old communist returning to Greece after 32 years in the Soviet Union is disillusioned with the state of things.
The story of a group of Rembetes, singers and musicians of the Greek equivalent to the blues, in the early decades of the 20th century, seen through the eyes of a young female singer.
After fleeing civil war in Liberia, a formerly-privileged refugee is barely scraping by in her new life in Greece when she strikes up an unexpected friendship with a rootless tour guide.
While having a day-long swim at Athens' queer beach, best friends Demosthenes and Nikitas recall the events of a recent summer in the prospect of turning them into a screenplay for Nikitas' feature debut.
Artemis, a single 24-year-old living in Paris, France, receives a frantic phone call from her mother—her father Paris is in the hospital and she must return home to Athens to care for him. Resentful of the tasking as she grew up estranged from her father, she becomes reacquainted with him over one emotional summer, learning the secret as to why their relationship was stifled when she finds out Jacob, Paris' friend, who's been always around from her childhood, was actually her dad's lover.
Rojda, a native of Iraqi Kurdistan and a soldier in the German army, travels to a refugee camp in Greece where she manages to meet her mother, who has bad news about her sister Dilan.
A lawyer, who represents the German government against the Greek reparation claims for Nazi crimes in World War II, travels to Greece and meets one of the remaining survivors of the Kalavryta massacre that took place in 1943.
With the Olympics returning to Greece, the opening ceremony of Athens 2004 sought to show the entire development of the Olympics over the centuries, until arriving at the modern Olympics.
In a working class neighborhood of Athens of the economic crisis, resurgence of fascism and covid19, a racist group of 18-year-old students persecute immigrants, homosexuals, anyone who is just different. A classmate of theirs who does not hide his dislike for their action quickly becomes their target.
Summertime. A family of three, a single father, Babis, and his twin children on the verge of adulthood, Konstantinos and Elsa, sail to the island of Poros on the family boat for their holidays. In the midst of swimming, sunbathing and making new friends, Konstantinos and Elsa meet unbeknownst to them, their birth mother Anna who abandoned them when they were babies. This encounter will stir up long-held feelings of resentment in Babis, resulting in a sun-kissed, bittersweet coming-of-age journey for everyone involved.
Hara leaves the maternity hospital with a baby in her arms. She spends her days caring for her newborn baby. Daily images of affection, familiarity, devotion and acquaintance with the baby in the rhythm of a lullaby. However, the repeated emergency news about the abduction of a baby from the maternity hospital comes to violently bring us back to reality.
