Favorite cinema Thessaloniki THE DAILY
Curtain for the film festival with the award ceremony.
Ten days of cinema and meetings. Especially this year we can not say which of the two was more important. After two years that the Thessaloniki Film Festival was forced, due to the circumstances, to leave its natural spaces, the cinemas, that is, this year they reacted not triumphantly, certainly encouraging for the cinephiles. Nearly 70,000 of them attended the screenings of this year’s organization, either in person or online. The first ones, among us, had the opportunity, in addition to the remarkable films, to enjoy the cinematic-festival experience again, to meet dear friends, but also the creators of the cinema, who seemed happy to present live again their job. .
The curtain that fell last Sunday night with the award ceremony, found the organizers excited as everything worked almost flawlessly, while the attendance in the halls was kept proportionally at a very positive 88% compared to the 60th festival of 2019. Even happier, of course, they were the winners of the awards, which as usual were not few.
“Tenderoudi”
First among them is the Frenchman Samuel Teiss, who won the love committee, together with the Golden Alexander (accompanied by a prize of 10,000 euros) for the beautiful “Tenderoudi”. In fact, his lovable little protagonist, Alyosa Renner, was honored with the male performance award. The corresponding award in women also went to Sofia Kokkali, for her performance in “Moon, 66 questions” by Jacqueline Lenzou.
As for the director’s award, it went to the Mexican Lorenzo Vigas for his excellent work in the film “The Box”, which once arrived from Venice to be distinguished in Thessaloniki. Two more films from Mostra were presented (out of competition) at the festival and left very good impressions: on the one hand the enjoyable “blasphemous” “Benedetta” by Paul Verhoeven and on the other the low “Power of the dog” by Jane Campion with the shocking . interpretation by Benedict Cumberbatch.
But to return to the awards and to go to the Greek cinema, which always has its honor in Thessaloniki, there stood out the promising debut “Magnetic fields” by George Gousis. It is characteristic that the film won a total of six awards, among them the Golden Alexander of the Film Forward section, as well as the awards of the International Federation of Critics, the Panhellenic Critics Association and the Cinema Center. Finally, it is worth noting that the Fisher Audience Award – for the film that the viewers liked the most – ended up in the enjoyable “Sheep Herd” by Takis Kanellopoulos.