Thessaloniki Festival with Fatih Akin, Dardenne and Aronofsky
In The Rhine Robbery, Fatih Akin tackles biography for the first time and tells the story of the famous rapper in Germany, Xatar.
November for the Greek “tribe” of cinema means the Thessaloniki Festival. For ten days, world cinema meets recent domestic production, in a marriage that even in its poorest moments presents interesting and pleasant surprises. How much more so this year, when the 63rd Festival (3-13/11) seems to lean towards the sure values, without, however, omitting the new voices, with a strong program inside and outside the competition that is subject to emotions.
Since we are talking about traditional values, there is no more representative example than Steven Spielberg, whose long-awaited “Fabelmans” opens on November 3. And our own neighborhood has, of course, its own star creators. Such is Fatih Akin, who will be in Thessaloniki in person to present the new film. In “The Rhine Robbery”, the Turkish-born German director tackles pure biography for the first time, telling the story of the famous rapper in Germany, Xatar. From the hell of an Iraqi prison to the immigration ghetto and from there to crime and finally to music history, the fascination of this particular hero certainly challenged Akin’s creative imagination. The sequel on the screen.
There, on the big screen of the Olympian, you will find the latest film of two more veterans. The Dardenne brothers, true to their social awareness, send us “Tori and Lokita”, the story of two tortured young children from Africa, two “unaccompanied alien minors”, as the Western world classifies them with accounting psychology, who are. faced with the harsh, often inhospitable reality of immigration. From the social abyss to the personal and Steve Buscemi’s Night Talks, a film starring Tessa Thompson as a helpline volunteer who spends endless nights listening to the thoughts and feelings of lonely, depressed and desperate people, on the top . of pandemic isolation.
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Aronofsky’s “Whale” and films by the Dardenne brothers, Buscemi, Serra and Ban Groningen will be screened at the 63rd FKTH.
Loneliness but also atonement is the theme of “Whale”, Darren Aronofsky’s new film, one of the best we saw at the last Venice Film Festival and which is about to make its pan-Hellenic premiere in Thessaloniki. Brendan Fraser is simply heartwarming in the role of a morbidly obese English literature professor who lives in isolation, with a singular desire to reconnect with his estranged daughter. Aronofsky directs with minimalism and mastery a deeply human film, which will hardly leave the spectators of the Olympian in tears.
As is well known, of course, every festival has its favourites. One such person for FKTH is the heretic Albert Serra, who this time gives his “present” with something quite different from what we are used to. “Pacification” deals with the story of the French nuclear tests in Tahiti, French Polynesia, and visually at least it looks dazzling, and in Cannes, where it premiered, it received enthusiastic reviews. Also from this year’s Croisette, and even with a prize in the bag, comes “The Eight Buns” by Felix van Groningen and Charlotte Vandermis, a story of true friendship, as two children become men, trying to erase the traces of their fathers.
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Finally, mention must also be made of the Festival’s multi-layered tribute to Theodoros Angelopoulos, ten years after the death of the leading Greek filmmaker. With only “Angelopoulos forever” and “Representation” as the core, the organizers seek to bring us a little closer to the deeper meaning of the specific work, but also of the universe of its creator as a whole: representation is nothing but the human interpretation of . of reality, that is, the force that composes the world around us.
In addition to the film itself, the days of the festival also featured a documentary-discussion between Theodoros Angelopoulos and Nikos Panagiotopoulos, while two major exhibitions, one visual and one photographic, form a bridge between the debut of the great director (i.e. the ” Representation”) and the swan song (“The other sea”) during the filming of which he also lost his life.