The Athens International Film Festival was the latest festival to fall for the charms of UK director Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut How to Have Sex this week, presenting the drama with the €2,000 Golden Athena award for best film.
The coming-of-age film about a group of teenagers on holiday shot in Greece and was co-produced by George Karnavas and Konstantinos Kontovrakis’ Heretic which also handles world sales. Local theatrical distributor and platform Cinobo picked up Greek rights.
How To Have Sex debuted at Cannes where it won the Un Certain Regard prize and nost recently won best film at Germany’s Filmfest Hamburg.
Walker was in Athens to support the film at the festival that ran from September 27 - October 9 in the Greek capital.
The five-strong international jury was led by UK writer and film critic Guy Lodge and included Anais Emery, director of the Geneva International Film Festival, and Greek film director Siamak Etemadi.
Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s debut 20.000 Species Of Bees, starring Sofia Otero, won the City of Athens’ best director award. The film was picked up by Greek theatrical outlet Weirdwave.
Another UK debut, Luna Carmoon’s Hoard, won the recipient of the best screenplay award. It was also picked up for Greece by Cinobo.
Special mentions went to Canadian director Anthony Shim’s Riceboy Sleeps and German director Timm Krogers’ The Universal Theory. The latter will be released in Greece by Cinobo.
Pier-Philippe Chevigny’s Richelieu won both the audience award and the Greek film critics’ award.
In the documentary competition, Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies won the €2,000 Golden Athena best film prize.
The documentary follows a woman searching for the truth of her family’s history and deals with personal and national events around the 1981 Arab Spring upheavals. It is Morocco’s submission to the best international Oscar.
Special mentions were offered to Russian director Agniia Galdanova’s Queendom, a socially engaged piece dealing with new forms of activism such as radical street performances and Ukrainian director Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days In Mariupol, the harrowing account of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Chernov has received a Pulitzer prize for the film which also won the audience award at Sundance in January. It is Ukraine’s submission to the international film Oscar.
The five-member doc jury was led by Karin Rywkind Segal, artistic director of Israel’s DocAviv Film Festival and included Jan Rofecamp, founder of the Films Transit sales company.
Local cinema campaign
Artistic director Loukas Katsikas dedicated this year’s event to a beloved local landmark, the Ideal cinema, one of the festival’s main venues. The 100-year old Ideal is facing closure amid plans to transform it into a five-star hotel. The festival is part of the campaign for the building to remain a cinema.
If closed, the Ideal would just be the latest city centre cinema to close, despite frantic lobbying of the Culture Ministry by the film industry to protest these buildings.
The industry is also waiting for the government to confirm details of the revised Cinema Law, the subsidies cash flow towards film production and the announced but much delayed merger of the Greek Film Centre with Ekome ,the agency running the cash and tax rebate for local and international shoots.
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