Blind Ambition, by Warwick Ross and Rob Coe
US director David France’s documentary How to Survive a Pandemic, an HBO production, will celebrate its world premiere in Greece, raising the curtain on the 24th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.
Back in 2020 the film’s director France, also a journalist, writer, director and gay rights activist, won the festival’s Golden Alexander (as well as the FIPRESCI and Mermaid Awards) for his Welcome to Chechnya.
How to Survive a Pandemic comes ten years after How to Survive a Plague, France’s Oscar-nominated documentary that delved into the political and social impact of the AIDS plague in the US at the beginning of the 1990s.
The opening film of the 24th TDF casts a perceptive and intriguing glance at the tremendous worldwide effort in the fields of research, development, regulation and the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccines, in the war against the pandemic.
Closing film Blind Ambition (pictured), by Warwick Ross and Rob Coe, follows Zimbabweans Joseph, Tinashe, Marvin and Pardon who left their economically hit homeland for a better life elsewhere. After their perilous journeys they arrive in South Africa, get jobs in restaurants, develop an interest in the intricacies of wine and become sommeliers, before forming the first-ever Zimbabwe team to compete in The World Wine Blind Tasting Championships – the Olympics of the wine world.
The 24th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival will be held from Thursday 10 to Sunday 20 March. Highlights include:
- Thessaloniki will screen 93 full-length and short docs.
- 32 movies take part in the Festival’s international program (International Competition, Newcomers Competition, >>Film Forward Competition, Open Horizons).
- 38 movies will be screened at the Platform section, while another 7 movies will be showcased at as part of the From screen to Screen section.
- 3 special screenings, among which the film The City and the City by Christos Passalis and Syllas Tzoumerkas, marking its Greek premiere following its world premiere at Berlinale’s Encounters competition section.
- The classic documentary The Grocer (2013) by Dimitris Koutsiabasakos will be universally accessible both in its physical screening and its online screenings.
- 12 benchmark documentaries of Greek cinema will be screened within the framework of the “Motherland, I See You” tribute.
- The 24th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival hosts 3 competition sections
- A total of 12 films, of which three are Greek, take part in the International Competition of the 24th TDF. The main prize is the Golden Alexander, accompanied by a 12,000-euro cash prize and the Special Jury Award, accompanied by a 5,000-euro cash prize.
- In the Newcomers competition section, featuring debut and sophomore films by young directors, audiences will see 12 films, of which three are Greek. The films will compete for the Golden Alexander – “Dimitri Eipides” (cash prize of 10,000 euros) and the Special Jury Award (4,000 euros).
- >>Film Forward, the competition section that questions film conventions and brings forth radical films, hosts a total of 12 films, of which three are Greek. The films compete Golden Alexander >>Film Forward (cash prize of 6,000 euros) and the Special Jury Award (cash prize of 3,000 euros).
Thessaloniki Doc Fest will also host a pre-festival online (geo-blocked) screening of Simon Lereng Wilmont’s multi-award winning film The Distant Barking of the Dogs. All revenues will be donated to the organization Voices of Children, which offers support to the children of the war-stricken areas of Ukraine.
The 24th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival includes a focus on Post-Reality and tributes to the work of the Latvian auteur Laila Pakalnina and Finnish filmmaker Virpi Suutari, screening 6 full-length and short docs from her filmography.
Dynamic actions, awards, projects and a series of collaborations are hosted in this year’s professional Agora presentation, which will be held in both physical spaces and online, writes the festival. TDF’s Agora, supported by the Creative Europe MEDIA program, bestows awards in services and cash prizes of a total value of 200,000 euros and will be held from March 11 to March 19 2022.
Podcast Section
Nineteen Greek-speaking and English-speaking podcasts make up the Podcast Competition section of the Festival, while fifteen podcasts are included in the Out of Competition section. In this year’s edition, the Festival, in collaboration with the Louis Lumière Grande École and the French Institute of Greece, offer the scholarship-award for Young Audio Documentary Creator.
