The Cinematheque

“The essence of Greek cinema is its diverse and intricate embrace of how to picture life’s experiences.”

Christos Dikeakos, visual artist and co-founder of the VGFF

With the fourth edition of our annual Vancouver Greek Film Festival, we’re delighted to welcome our new partner, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University, under the leadership of its director, Professor Dimitris Krallis.

This year’s festival pivots to the month of March, to bring a little Aegean turquoise and Greek sun to the lower mainland as it emerges into spring and marks Greek Independence Day on March 25.

We open with Boy on a Dolphin, a pleasurable and touristic window on village life and its connection to the ancient past, with surprisingly contemporary themes of cultural appropriation and theft. Many of the same sights and sounds (village life, Greek church ritual, dancing, patriarchy) are analyzed and critiqued in the caustic and quasi-anthropological The Shepherds of Calamity. This contrast should prove illuminating and entertaining.

Considered by many to be the greatest Greek film ever made, and one of the high watermarks of world cinema, we present a new restoration of director Theo Angelopoulos’s masterpiece The Travelling Players on its 50th anniversary. Angelopoulos traces an alternate history of mid-20th-century Greece as a company of players travels the epic Greek landscape through both time and space.

Topos by filmmaker and visual artist Antoinetta Angelidi presents a counter-narrative of contemporary Greece by connecting it to Angelidi’s dreamlife, knowledge of the pictorial traditions of western art, and her own feminist politics.

The popular A Touch of Spice and the documentary portrait 01, in their own ways, touch on cultural displacement and the complexities of Greek identity. A Touch of Spice reminds us of the presences and absences of Greeks in Anatolia, and that exile can pertain to people of Greek descent who, ironically, live in Greece. 01 connects diasporic Greek artists and intellectuals to western artistic practices, as well as contemporary Greek arts and letters.

The iconic On the Waterfront, a passion project of Greek American director Elia Kazan, reminds viewers of the artistic achievements of ​“Greeks in diaspora,” something we acknowledge on many levels with our festival.

Enjoy yourselves!
καλά να περάσεις
Harry Killas
Curator, Vancouver Greek Film Festival

Series sponsors
Anastase E. Maragos, Watson Goepel LLP
Omega Travel 

Film sponsors
Anastase E. Maragos, Watson Goepel LLP
Christos & Sophie Dikeakos
Moshe Mastai