Organisers of the 27th Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival announced February 10 the ten films that will compete in the >>Film Forward competition section.
Awards include the >>Film Forward Golden Alexander, featuring a 6,000-euro cash prize, and the >>Film Forward Silver Alexander, featuring a 3,000-euro cash prize. The 27th Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival runs March 6-16.
The >>Film Forward documentary selections are:
- Death Plan for a Dog and a Man, Christos Karakepelis, Greece, 2024, 66΄ (World Premiere). In lockdown hibernation, an outcast like an invulnerable superhero, plans an epic escape for himself and his dog; he wants to escape the deadliest virus: life itself. An adventurous death trip that will magically drive them both from their hovel to the wild mountains and up to New York, from suffocating reality to absolute freedom.
- NovaMax SkyLand, Dionysia Kopana, Greece, 2025, 78΄ (World Premiere). Among Athenian balconies, fragmented images, sounds, and fleeting and incomplete stories emerge. The seasons change, the significant intertwines with the insignificant, and beauty and ugliness coexist. Weather phenomena, absurd circumstances, events, human gestures, and other fragments of life weave together the spectrum of an urban ecosystem.
- The One Who Hopes, Stratis Chatzielenoudas, Greece, 2025, 67΄ (World Premiere). In the twilight of a post-apocalyptic age, an intergalactic traveller seeks the sacred language of birds on the last remaining planet. With an artificial mind as her companion, she will learn that even in the stillness of silence, the desire to communicate endures, unyielding and eternal.
- Endless Cookie, Seth Scriver & Peter Scriver, Canada, 2025, 97΄ (European premiere). Endless Cookie is a new full-length animation from Seth & Pete Scriver, playing out like a particularly tangential fever dream – a colourful depiction of the many overlapping episodes of the brothers’ lives – from their upbringing in Downtown Toronto’s Kensington Market to Pete’s current residence in an isolated Northern Manitoba First Nation community. As they reminisce, their yarns are often punctuated, interrupted or else hijacked by the charismatic members of their family who indulge in their own reveries. Endless Cookie is at heart an impressionistic and often surreal depiction of family but it is also a documentary of the creative process.
- Meanwhile, Catherine Gund, USA, 2024, 89΄ (European premiere). Meanwhile is a docu-poem in six verses about artists breathing through chaos. Through a dynamic collaborative process, the artists’ expressions are combined with historical and observational footage to unveil a rare cinematic meditation about identity, race, racism, and resistance as they shape our shared breath. Meanwhile is not just a film; it’s a journey, a conversation, an experience not an education, reflecting the chaos of existence and the beauty found within it. Since its inception in 2020, this cinematic poem has been a communal effort to explore the complexities of truth and identity. Cinema—like identity—is entirely constructed, merely and astonishingly, a practice.
- Museum of the Night, Fermín Eloy Acosta, Argentina, 2025, 88΄ (World premiere). At the end of the 1960s, Argentine artist Leandro Katz participated in “Theatre of the Ridiculous”, an eccentric group linked to New York’s queer underground. This film-essay moves between archives, testimonies, and spectres of the past that question the present. Photography, film, video, and sound intertwine to approach, if only in brief flashes, that mythical past and raise questions about time, art, sexuality, death, and cinema.
- Erreplika, Pello Gutiérrez, Spain, 2024, 74΄ (International premiere). In 1979 the Virgin of Zikuñaga disappeared, leaving its inhabitants without her iconic image. A gap in the niche. A collective void. My father, the filmmaker Juanmi Gutiérrez, passed away some years ago. Now, from a distance, I return to his films in an exercise of personal memory through the image, or rather, through its absence.
- Seeds, Brittany Shyne, USA, 2025, 122΄ (International premiere). Interweaving the stories of three Black generational farmers, SEEDS paints an intimate portrait of farming today—its joys, struggles, and the fragility of legacy. With remarkable closeness, the film captures daily life—harvesting, fixing machinery, and facing financial strain—while savoring quiet moments of warmth and connection. Against this backdrop, the stark reality looms: Black-owned farmland has shrunk from 16 million acres in 1910 to a fraction today, with systemic barriers still in place. Through these intergenerational stories, SEEDS reveals cycles of inequity, resilience, and the deep ancestral ties that shape our relationship to the land.
- Where Do You Call Home?, Ana Pérez-Quiroga, Portugal, 2025, 73΄ (World premiere). “Where do you call home?” was the question faced by nearly 3,000 Spanish children exiled in the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This film tells the story of one of them, Angelita Perez, who lived in Russian boarding schools from ages 4 to 24 until completing her medical studies in Moscow. It is a tale of resilience, love, and identity, intertwining past and present, history and memory. It also explores the bond between a mother and daughter—the director and her mother—through shared songs and stories. Revisiting Angelita’s journey is both a tribute to her strength and a declaration of love.
- Zodiac Killer Project, Charlie Shackleton, USA-UK, 2025, 92΄ (International premiere). The true crime genre’s ubiquity is driven by people’s endless fascination, disgust, and—bizarrely—search for comfort in genre conventions that still have the ability to generate complex emotions despite their predictability and familiarity. Having tried and failed to make a documentary about the infamous Zodiac Killer, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton walks the viewer through what his film would have been like and why, using Bay Area landscapes, reenactments, film and TV clips, and voice-over. In this wholly original, self-aware cinematic work, a filmmaker chews over what might have been and playfully probes the inner workings of a genre at saturation point.
