Festival In Focus: Thessaloniki Aims To Reinvent The Role Of A Film Festival With Its 63rd Edition
deadline.comOrestis Andreadakis, director of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, has a lot on his mind when he sits down with Deadline via Zoom from his office in Athens.
Climate change, women’s rights, and the war in Ukraine are all topics he discussed, and he believes film festivals, including his own, must find a way to address and interrogate wider social issues. “For us, it’s not only about films with big names or premieres,” Andreadakis tells Deadline. “We want to say something.
We want to leave a trace in our hearts, soul, and mind.” As such, this year, Thessaloniki’s lineup is littered with socially-minded films like British filmmaker Georgia Oakley’s debut feature Blue Jean, a soulful drama about homophobia in Thatcherite Britain, and Wolf and Dog by Cláudia Varejão, an astute film about gender roles and human interactions.
Overall, 199 full-length films will screen across Thessaloniki’s various sections. The selection will be bookended by Steven Spielberg’s latest film, The Fabelmans, which will open the festival on November 3, and the November 13 closer Corsage, the buzzy Vicky Krieps-starrer from Austrian filmmaker Marie Kreutzer.
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