The lights dim, and a hush descends on the murmuring crowd. For a second in the darkness, the only noise is the buzzing of the desk fan – an ad-hoc solution to the somewhat appropriate heat wave which has surprised Amsterdam, just in time for the inaugural Greek Film Festival in the Netherlands.
The screen in Cavia’s historic theatre bursts into life – with a colourful super-cut of clips from the festival’s 2026 selection. The montage is set to a Greek cover of Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now. And from the very beginning, the themes that programmer Dimitra Alexiou and producer Nickie Katrantsioti are playing with become apparent.
Alienation, isolation, a longing for the past; made toxic through the trappings of nostalgia, or processed through creation and community.
Programming as storytelling
Before the films roll, Alexiou tells IFL, “We are so excited with our first edition! Our goal is to promote and celebrate Greek cinema, and we feel we completely succeeded in this. People were excited and interested, and be sure that there is more to come, this was just the start!”
The GRFFNL’s inaugural edition in Amsterdam spans three days at Filmhuis Cavia – including feature film screenings, and sold-out industry workshops. But I have arrived on the second day, to take in the festival’s two short film programmes; curated in collaboration with Greece’s Drama International Short Film Festival.
Short film is underestimated by audiences, critics and programmers alike. However irrational it is, there is still the belief among many of those people that the short format does not constitute a ‘real’ movie – but if you are looking to get a quick overview of a new cinematic culture as a viewer, or if you are looking for the chance to build a thematic thread that your audiences can think about and act on as a programmer, short film is the best place to start.
Obviously, I do not mean that all the intricacies of an entire national cinematic tradition can be unpicked in one or two trips to the movies. But as the two programmes unfold, some distinct patterns do emerge – films paired with each other, or at opposite ends of the showcase, almost seem to rhyme.
Nostalgia: as refuge and as prison
As the low-fi trailer proceeding the shorts suggests, a sense of longing to return to a hopeful, ‘safe’ past is present from the beginning – often manifesting itself through material nostalgia for extinct media. For a diaspora of any kind, that can speak to the longing for ‘home’, and of reconnecting to now-distant values and comforts in a new – and sometimes hostile – environment. But it can also speak more specifically to the social and political trappings of that culture, and the risks of looking at a damaging past through rose-tinted glasses, to ignore the lessons that need learning.
In director Thelyia Petraki’s 400 Cassettes, a heartfelt story of grief and lost love, characters revisit cherished memories of a past they are being carried further and further from through the gloriously fuzzy music of a compact tape; while in Giorgos Aggelopoulos’ Or, How to Disappear, the protagonist escapes into VHS fantasies at moments of discomfort, when challenged to rebuild his fragmented sense of self following undisclosed trauma.
In both cases, the narrative eventually finds ways for them to reconcile with the fading echoes of the past, while finding healthy ways to live in the present. But following shorts also tell cautionary tales of what can happen if we live exclusively within this space of nostalgia – when it becomes less a refuge, more a prison.
Avantaz – directed by Christos Tatsis – is set in a bouzoukia venue, decades after its spectacular fall from grace. Cutting to faux-archive footage, including VHS recordings of newscasts covering the events, the mockumentary shows how the club – once a booming hive of activity – has seen attendance diminish over three decades, blaming the decline on a shooting in the carpark. The club’s owner “accidentally” fatally shot a patron of the bar, following a drunken altercation, before fleeing, never to be seen again. The remaining team members remain almost frozen in time – refusing to change, as fewer and fewer attendees shuffle through the doors; their old-fashioned laïkó music, cliché plate-smashing, and dancing proving less and less of a draw – all the while, recounting the fateful night through absurd exaggerations (often condemning other ‘salacious rumours’ connected to the events in the same breath).
Whatever actually happened on the night of the shooting, however, it seems less and less the point. Other venues have come back from worse events. What really seems to be holding the place back, is a refusal to admit times have changed. In every VHS-tinted harking back to a “better time”, one supposedly uniquely characterised by a desire to be genuine and truthful, the characters stage a figurative recreation of their owner’s actions – running from reality, in service of the toxic legacy of a supposedly honourable past that never existed.
Similarly, 100 Years Ahead from director Michael Gigintis skewers both a political project, and a generation of Greeks who cannot escape its ideological ghost long after its collapse. A 50-something private detective abducts his neighbour – a cinema-owner who is about to sign their building away to developers – to inform him of the importance of class struggle, via a walk down memory lane around the rise and fall of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (commonly known as PASOK). Flickering projector images, and a cassette recording of the endless meandering monologue aim to transport the two figures back to that ‘safer’, more ‘honest’ historical moment – and deny the state of disrepair that PASOK’s actions left both socialism and the state of Greece in.
In a similar experience to people raised during the Reagan era in the US (albeit on the other side of the political spectrum), the man was told repeatedly that in this brave new dawn, he was destined for greatness – that the future was his. And when that government falls apart, having never lived up to its promises, he is not able to come to terms with it, because in essence it also would force him to admit he is not inherently special, or chosen. Instead, he torments his younger counterpart into ‘taking a stand’ – as if to reassert himself as a central figure to the imagined ‘great train of history’, if not to deliver a great victory directly, then to inspire it – before merrily leaving the cinema-owner to take responsibility for everything. Nothing has changed, and nothing will change, the same damaging delusions that commenced the film conclude it – and amid the trappings of nostalgia, we are left to reflect on the reality that those who will not learn from history doom themselves to repeat it.
Art as acceptance
Ultimately, though, the programmes also serve as a timely reminder of the power of art to help us come to terms with this impermanence. To accept the fact that things can and do change – and that we do not need to be at the centre of an unchanging universe to live happily, or to make a difference.
A trio of documentaries underline this.
Requiem in Salt, directed by Sylvia Nicolaides and Nicolas Iordanou, follows Motoi Yamamoto as he creates a huge floor-mural through purifying salt. The salt, used in Japan to prepare people for burial, ties him to some of the most painful losses of his life – including his late wife – but also to the crumbling of the very rock we stand upon. All things, however immovable they seem, must pass – and so in his terms, he “borrows” a resource from the sea, knowing that his art (which is worn and torn by the elements until it disappears entirely) is impermanent – but no less beautiful for it, just like his life, or those of his loved ones.
Yannis Karpouzis’ Magdalena Hausen: Frozen Time follows the titular photographer, as she recounts her career in pictures. Stemming from her family archive – and a way of supposedly reconnecting with the long-lost relatives she thought were immortalised there, Hausen finds herself chasing an impossible dream: to photograph the wind. But as the story progresses, only the effect of the wind is ever captured by her lens – never the wind itself. And as she grapples with this, she grapples with the reality that even in her dearest images, the people depicted are only an echo, one which degrades and warps over time – they provide no direct line to the people themselves. They are gone. But the force which forged those people, which drove their lives remains. Similarly, the force that guided the 2000s Greek protest movement which she photographed so prolifically remains – even if the exact conditions of the time have passed. In echoes of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, she admits that amid the uncertainty of mortality, and of personal and political shortcomings, there is comfort to take from not being the centre of the universe – and that the wind is still blowing.
And closing the shorts, putting a cap on this, is My Green Garden. After her father’s death, director Eleni Tsekeri takes her camera to Tinos – in what she calls a bid to save the community, and herself. Her father was a prolific gardener, and much of the film finds Tsekeri and her camera in the fields where Tinos’ residents have cultivated crops for generations. Now, their claim to the land is being challenged by developers, who are intent on installing wind-farms across the island. While she catches fleeting glimpses of her father in their work, and while she finds meaning in their struggle to fend off the corporate interests of modernity, the idea of saving the community, or herself, seems immediately futile.
But as she prepares to leave, defeated, her host – a kindly gardener whose work is reminiscent of Tsekeri’s father – imparts some final enigmatic advice with her; essentially steering her to be the best version of herself she can. There will be places and communities which are lost, and there will be people who we lose – but they can live on in us, and beyond us, in the way we spend the little time given to us too. We can take solace, and offer it, by engaging with other people – wherever we are in the world.
The wind is still blowing
As the first edition of GRFFNL draws to a successful conclusion, it has more than lived up to that. It has delivered a space for Greeks in Amsterdam and beyond, to revel and reconnect with their old home. It has also given another precious illustration as to why Amsterdam’s multicultural heritage is so important to fight for – by introducing other audiences to Greek cinema, and to help them reflect on the common threads we have running through our lives, and our societies.
I think perhaps most importantly, though, it has shown the role that film in particular can still play in all of this. Channelling the power of cinematic mediums old and new into this distinct audio-visual art, film gives us a space to think about time, the universe, and our place in them. We can take refuge in our reflections of the past, but ultimately that needs to be as part of a process of acceptance, community and creation.
GRFFNL is part of that process – a product of the changes that scatter us to all corners of the world, but also give us the opportunity to experience and enjoy the new. The wind is still blowing, but that needn’t be a bad thing.
