"We had been hoping to organize a Greek film festival for some years now, and this time, the stars seem to have aligned." Tsitsopoulou is teaching," Terkourafi said. "This semester, we've been fortunate to be able to offer a course on contemporary Greek culture and film, which Dr. March 3 (Saturday).Įach film will be introduced by Vassiliki Tsitsopoulou, a visiting lecturer on Modern Greek studies. This film, directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari and released in 2010, has won awards from festivals in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Italy and Romania.
The festival will close with "Attenberg," a provocative tale of an awkward, naïve 23-year-old woman coping with her father's impending death while attempting to learn how to navigate adulthood, guided by one friend and the wildlife documentaries of David Attenborough. Directed by Dimitris Koutsiabasakos, the film won a special jury award from the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival in 2006. It's quite upbeat and has some humor in it," Terkourafi said.
"It's not sentimental and it's not cynical. The festival will open with "The Guardian's Son," made in 2006, about a young television reporter who visits his family's ancestral village and is drawn into staging a "return of the dead" prank in an effort to save a local landmark from demolition. With the help of a Chicago-based group called The FilmHellenes, Terkourafi chose the seven films that will appeal to general audiences to be shown at the Art Theater. The movies feature universal themes - intergenerational relationships, what it's like to be young, leaving home, life in the big city, exploring sexual identity. However, their frustration with the Greek government and the lack of luxurious trailers and craft services doesn't have a starring role on screen. "They work with the director because they are friends. "What is happening is that people perform in their own clothes, they are filmed in their own houses, the actors are not paid," Terkourafi said. Calling themselves Filmmakers in the Mist (alluding to near-extinct gorillas), the 200 or so members of this group resorted to "guerrilla" filmmaking - creating movies out of barebones budgets. "There has been an outburst of artistic activity in Greece," she said, "because people feel the need to express themselves when they're not heard by the politicians."Ībout four years ago, as a means of protesting outdated movie-making regulations, Greek filmmakers organized a boycott of the competitive portion of the nation's annual film festival. Marina Terkourafi, the program director and a linguistics professor, calls this event the "first" Greek film fest, because she hopes it will become an annual event. The Modern Greek Studies program at the University of Illinois will showcase a selection of these new movies in a Greek Film Festival March 2 and 3 (Friday and Saturday) at the Art Theater in downtown Champaign. Marina Terkourafi, the director of the Modern Greek Studies program and a linguistics professor, says the Greek film industry is revitalized "because people feel the need to express themselves when they're not heard by the politicians."