Cinema is a restless organism, always probing, reshaping, sometimes cheating. Like a social amoeba it interacts, it expands and occasionally bursts, it lays dormant or shrinks when in danger. The Thessaloniki International Film Festival is for many years now a part of this biological process of Cinema. From the marketplace to the experimentwe represent filmin all itsmanifestations, hoping to keep it alive andwell. Part of our constant evolution is the introduction of a new pilot module this November, granting even more emphasis on the avantgarde and experimental film.
Our new“amoeba”, the Experimental Forum, will venture to create a new channel between our audience and the Avant-Garde film, free fromall conventions on the one hand but examined and presented through the prism of Cinema on the other.

Despina Mouzaki
Director of the Festival

We will navigate towards the future of this new module by opening a door to the past,with a two-fold presentation of rarely seen avant-garde from Hungary and Croatia.
The visit of the Croatian Ivan Ladislav Galeta, gives us a good reason to celebrate our inauguration. The six short films that comprise his entire filmography and Galeta himself, as an artist-thinker-filmmaker rank amongst the best examples of the experimental film’s potential that we aspire to keep presenting.

The Hungarian Experimental Film of the Béla Balázs Studio is given the lion’s share; through five programs we shall present one of the most comprehensive compilations on the subject to date. Budapest’s “Factory” offers a unique view from the Avant-Garde of  that time in Eastern Europe and one we believe deserves as much attention as its Western counterparts.

Vassilis Bourikas
Programmer