The new self-destructive American Dream

By Dimitra Nikolopoulou

In Lauren Greenfield’s documentaries the extreme materialistic system reveals its sharpened teeth. The American documentary filmmaker chronicles the grandeur and the decline of a nouveau riche society that seems to ignore the dangers of being greedy. Sex, power, perfect body and fame, become currencies in the stock market of mass culture.

by Jonathan Murray

Animated documentary filmmaking’s rise is one of the central innovations witnessed within twenty-first-century documentary cinema. The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival’s 22nd edition therefore makes a tribute to animation’s distinctive, and still-evolving, contribution to documentary art. The tribute’s 21 films trace the historical roots of short- and long-form animated documentary filmmaking. But they also facilitate an appreciation of the aesthetic, conceptual, and thematic routes that the animated documentary has since pursued. Viewed collectively, these films allow us to understand the various reasons why directors use animation within contemporary documentary work; the diverse ways in which animated documentary has changed contemporary documentary filmmaking conventions; and many of the paradigmatic subject matters and documentary theories that animated documentary filmmakers have explored to date.

By Giannis Smoilis

Greek documentary has a powerful presence at the 22nd Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, turning its lens towards stories, images and actions that wait patiently around us to be discovered. A total of 78 films about faces, things, feelings, places, memories, ideas, words, filled with the busting “traffic” of the real, bound to thrill, raise concerns, trigger reactions and fascinate in unexpected ways.

Greek documentarists, ready as always to grasp the pulse of the real, invite us along the paths that open up when aesthetics and truth intersect.

The big screen always stays tuned to the zeitgeist, the ever-changing spirit of the times. As the environmental movement gains ground in recent years, Thessaloniki Documentary Festival presents an innovative tribute on the new reality that dawns on the planet.

By Aggeliki Stellaki

We’ve all posted them on our social media profiles, we’ve all been amused or vexed by them, but very few of us can provide a solid definition, trace their origins or take a stand on their dizzying spread. The 22nd Thessaloniki Documentary Festival attempts to navigate into the brave new world of memes, through a tribute that poses challenges, raises concern, but never fails to provide pure entertainment as well.