One year since Thessaloniki International Airport. The documentary festival has planned its 2025 edition around the theme of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is advancing by leaps and bounds, disrupting industries, reshaping livelihoods, flooding our feeds with machine-generated filth, and further blurring the lines between reality and fiction. The old adage “seeing is believing” no longer applies.
But Oretis Andreadakis, director of Thessaloniki Festival, says what feels like an existential threat can also be considered a challenge, and even a call to action. “It’s true that AI has become increasingly present in our daily lives, in many unpredictable and unexpected ways. Its ubiquity is undoubtedly complicating our relationship with truth,” Andreadakis told Variety.
“The way information is distributed and stories are constructed has changed significantly, often leaving us frustrated, confused, and even fooled. The same is true of how we perceive reality,” he continues. “Many of the films we’re screening this year…remind us that documentary isn’t just about showing reality, it’s about engaging with reality in a critical way. Far from making documentaries less important, this moment makes clear why we need them now more than ever.”
A writer, thinker, and veteran critic who has been at the helm of Thessaloniki Festival and its sister events since 2016, Andreadakis has spent time pondering how AI, technology, and digital disruption will transform both cinema and everyday life. The results, he found, were often troubling. “In today’s digital world, everything is recorded and we struggle to keep it alive and preserve it for future use,” he says. “If everything is available, nothing really exists.”
This realization helped inspire the thematic framework for the 28th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, which will be held from March 5th to 15th. The festival offers a cinematic tribute to the archive and celebrates its creative use “not as a static, closed archive of the past, but as something living, pulsating and ever-changing,” says Andreadakis.
This year’s issue opens on March 5th with “Ask E. Jean.” The book is Ivy Mehropol’s documentary about E. Jean Carroll, a renowned advice columnist, editor, best-selling author, and pioneering journalist who twice sued President Trump for sexual assault and defamation, and won both times. The festival concludes on March 15 with David Borenstein and Pavel Tarankin’s Oscar-nominated film “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” about a Russian teacher battling nationalist propaganda. Following the closing ceremony, the Academy Awards ceremony will be broadcast live from the Dolby Theater.
Thessaloniki Festival Director Oretis Andreadakis
Provided by Olympia Kurasagaki
This year’s event will feature a total of 252 feature and short documentary films, including a record 80 world premieres, 32 international premieres and 11 European premieres. Among the 14 films vying for the Golden Alexander in the international competition is Sundance Jury Prize winner Nuisance Bear, directed by Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Wiseman, which explores the human threat to the remote Canadian wilderness known as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World,” which will have its international premiere in Thessaloniki.
Also arriving from Park City are Janai Bouros and Abd al-Kader Habak’s Birds of War, which delves into the personal archives of London-based Lebanese journalist Bouros and Syria-based activist and cameraman Habak, exploring their love through 13 years of revolution, war and exile, and Sinead O’Shea’s All About the Money, which follows the founding of billionaire media mogul Fergie Chambers. A Marxist-Leninist group in rural Massachusetts.
World premieres include BAFTA-winner James Dawson’s Derek vs. Derek, about two feuding farmers in the English countryside, and Norwegian director Annette Ostro’s The Golden Swan, which uses poems and letters discovered after his death to reconstruct the final months of the director’s brother, who was kidnapped by militants in Kashmir.
A trio of Greek filmmakers will also submit their new works to an international competition. “Bugboy,” directed by Lucas Paleocrasas, is about a shy teenager with misaligned eyes who escapes into a world of insects. Phocion Bogris, whose film The Golden Grip depicts 50 years of Greek cinema from the perspective of a prolific supporting actor. And Eirini Vulloumis offers a portrait of Athens told through the lives of three veteran taxi drivers in The Way Elsewhere.
Highlights of this year’s event include a special screening of Oscar-winning French actress Juliette Binoche’s directorial debut, In Eye in Motion; Juliette Binoche will also give a masterclass on her illustrious career and transition into directing. The festival will also host the world premiere of Desmond Child Shakes the Parthenon, directed by Heather Winters, with legendary American songwriter Child and the film’s producer, composer and lyricist Phoebus scheduled to be in attendance.
Meanwhile, Oscar-nominated filmmaker and multimedia artist Bill Morrison (Dawson City: Frozen Time) will be awarded the Honorary Golden Alexander, where Morrison will give a masterclass on his evolution as an artist and filmmaker, and how archival footage has played a role in his practice. The festival will pay tribute to Morrison by presenting a selection of his acclaimed works. Thessaloniki will also screen 20 films by Greek film pioneer Vvoula Skoura, and celebrate iconic film producer Yorgos Paparios, whose name has become synonymous with the rebirth of Greek cinema. Both will receive the prestigious Golden Alexander Award at a special ceremony.
Finally, this year’s festival will include a preview of Filmography, an upcoming digital database that will document, preserve and present Greek cinema, with detailed information on over 2,000 films and highlighting the moments and figures that shaped Greek cinema. The platform, a collaboration between Thessaloniki Film Festival, the Hellenic Film Audiovisual Center (EKKOMED) and the Hellenic Film Academy, will be fully available this spring and will be introduced at a presentation on March 13th.
Thessaloniki International Airport Documentary Festival will be held from March 5th to 15th.
