Greek Film Centre

Three teenagers are confined to an isolated country estate that could very well be on another planet. The trio spend their days listening to endless homemade tapes that teach them a whole new vocabulary. Any word that comes from beyond their family abode is instantly assigned a new meaning. Hence 'the sea' refers to a large armchair and 'zombies' are little yellow flowers. Having invented a brother whom they claim to have ostracized for his disobedience, the uber-controlling parents terrorize their offspring into submission.

An old communist returning to Greece after 32 years in the Soviet Union is disillusioned with the state of things.

Two friends from a small Greek town travel to Bulgaria and Switzerland, hoping they can gain money from the difference in foreign exchange rates.

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)

Renos is an old-time waiter with a meticulous routine. He is a loner and an avid collector of information. His repetitive daily routine liberates him from the agony of pursuing the unknown. The unexpected events that invade his life hide many surprises.

Dimitris, a 23 yr. old swimming champion, meets Elsa, a yound environmental activist. Their relation, and her sudden dissaperance, make him re-evaluate his settled life.

After having an accident Nassos is brought into a hospital where he lies in coma without regaining his consciousness. All his friends visit him and each of them remembers the most important moments of their friendships.

Based on the book by Ilias Venezis "The Number 31328", the film by Nikos Koundouros unfolds through the personal tragedies of three characters, the Asia Minor Disaster and the agonizing travails of the Asia Minor Greeks who had been arrested and led to death by Kemal's troops and armed groups of Muslims. The wife of a merchant, a teacher and a seventeen-year old boy try to survive, following the column of prisoners into the depths of Asia Minor.

A young woman's struggle to overcome life's economic restrictions in order to meet her true will. She is twenty-three and lives with her mother, a compromise she can no longer stand. Despite her meager economic means, only enough to survive the first two months, she moves out and rents a 45m2 apartment of her own. During these two months of freedom, she explores her true self and approaches a more poetic and liberal culture, for her, a new way of life that slowly unfolds as she rummages through the belongings that the former renter, a guy her age, has left in the apartment.

In a country shaken by major political events, three generations of a Greek family clash over an inside-the-family adoption.

Djam, a Greek girl, is sent to Istanbul on a mission to find a motor-boat part of her uncle

By the 14th century, the Byzantine Empire was, if not on the verge of actual collapse, at least seriously decadent and clearly on its last legs. The hungry wolves of Europe were preparing to dine on its corpse, and as a result the Byzantine army and its allies were constantly engaged in battles and skirmishes. In this story, a widow lives in the 14th-century Byzantine village of Doxobus with her son Xenos. She forms a relationship with a village elder, and when she gives birth to the elder’s son, her son from her previous marriage is sent to live in a monastery.

New Year 1996. The Balkans are shaken by nationalist wars, after the overthrow of socialist regimes. The wars have resulted in economic crisis and large population displacements. Three women, unknown to each other, from different Eastern European countries, meet in a border town in Bulgaria, in order to cross illegally into Greece.

With the arrival of a self-confident and rebellious beautiful girl in the village, a romantic 16-year-old will be in for a surprise, as the unprecedented feelings of love and passion will offer a gradual but marvellous passage to adulthood.

A group of friends decide to marry

Four undertakers in financial trouble latch onto a one-off opportunity to change their lives and bid farewell to a profession they entered for a while, but got stuck in for good. On the promise of a large fee, they fulfill the dying wish of a rich Greek who lived his life abroad: he wants them to take his body from Athens to a village in Boeotia for burial...on foot. Deciding to grant his bizarre request, they embark on an odyssey, which soon becomes an unexpected voyage of discovery.

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.

Antonis arrives at a hotel resort by the sea. It is wintertime, the hotel is closed and Antonis drifts around alone. He has a lot of time to kill. Until television announces the disappearance of the famous TV host Antonis Paraskevas…

In the middle of the Aegean Sea, six men on a fishing trip on a luxury yacht decide to play a game. During this game, things will be compared. Things will be measured. Songs will be butchered, and blood will be tested. Friends will become rivals and rivals will become hungry. But at the end of the journey, when the game is over, the man who wins will be the best man. And he will wear on his smallest finger the victory ring: the Chevalier.

A Short Film by Christos Vakalopoulos