Todd Haynes' Venice Jury Prize winner I Am Not There, accompanied by its producer Christine Vachon, will be the closing film.
The international jury for this year's $14,000 (Euros 10,000)competitionincludes composer Michael Galasso, film critic Stephen Dalton, musician Raine Blaininger, actress Themis Bazaka and Vachon who will also offer a Masterclass.
They will award the Golden Athena Awards.
This jury judges films selected in the traditional Competition Section of the festival.
The 13filmsin competitioninclude Jeff Nichol's Shotgun Stories (USA), Eran Kollirin's The Band's Visit (Israel), Celine Sciamma's La Naissance Des Pieuvres (France), Lucia Puenzo's XXY (Argentina), Yinan Diao's Night Train (China), Osamu Minorikawa's Life Can Be So Wonderful (Japan), Park Chul-Hee's No Mercy For the Rude (Korea) and Rodrigo Pla's La Zona (Mexico).
This year there will be a second competition devoted to filmsand music. Among the competitors are:
Julien Temple's Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (Ireland/ UK), Anton Corbijn's Control (UK), Gene Graham's The Godfather Of Disco (USA), Chris Hall's and Mike Kerry's Love Story (UK), Dean Deblois' Heima, A Film on Sigur Ros (Iceland), Rick Ernst's Get Thrashed:The Story of Thrash Metal (USA), Jacques Sarasin's Le Battelier De La Rumba (France), Stefan Schwietert's Distant Echoes (Switzerland/Germany) and W.T. Morgan's X: The Unheard Music (USA).
Highlights in the 26 titles-strong non-competitive premieres and Panorama sections showcasing films celebrated and awarded in international festivals throughout the year include among others Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, Joe Wright's Atonement, Roy Andersson's Du Lavande (Sweden), Etgar Keret's and Shira Geffen's Meduzot (Israel)), Shane Meadows' This Is England (UK), Enrique Begne's Dos Abrazos (Mexico), Lenny Abrahamson's Garage (Ireland), Jane Birkin's Boxes (France), Zoe Cassavetes' Broken English (USA) and Brad Bird's Ratatouille (USA).
Birkin and Casavetes will attend the festival to present their films while Ratatouille's supervising animator Mark Walsh (Pixar Studios) will offer a Masterclass.
British directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield will be present to introduce Earth, their feature long documentary compiled from footagefrom theirmonumental BBC series Planet Earth.
Earth forms part of the Cinema Calls Environment section introduced last year with the presentation of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth.
This year in response to the large-scale destruction caused by the wildfires over the past few weeks in the country the festival and the Danaos theatre, where the section is hosted, will donate the box office revenues to a special relief account created for fire victims.
Other documentaries presented in this section include Daniel B. Gold's and Judith Helfand's Everything's Cool (USA) a well as the Greek productions Where Does My Computer Goes When It Dies by last year's Fipa award winner Giorgos Avgeropoulos and his Exandas team as well as Oogruk Means Oil by Sotiris Danezis and Dimitris Geradis from the Mega channel award-winning series War Zone.
Michael Moore's Sicko will have its Greek premiere in the World Documentaries section alongside films including Canadian Debbie Melnyk and Rick Kaine's polemic Manufacturing Dissent:Uncovering Michael Moore.
Leopold Grun from Germany offers The Red Elvis while among the numerous American productions showcased are Barbara Leibovitz's Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens, Jeff Garlin's This Filthy World, Taylor Brodsky's Sundance awarded Hear And Now, Robinson Devors' Zoo, and For the Bible Tells Me So by Daniel Karslake who will introduce the European premiere of the film.
Leading the homages section is oneforAmerican veteran film maker William Friedkin who will be present to present a retrospective of his films.
Friedkin, who made a remarkable comeback with Bug (FIPRESCI Award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival), will also offer a Masterclass and will receive the Honorary Golden Athena for his contribution to the cinema art. The director will be accompanied by his wife, Academy Award winning American producer Sherry Lansing.
Other tributes are those reserved to the legendary German director Max Ophuls (1902-1957) and his son Marcel Ophuls director of the Academy Award winning anti-Νazi documentary documentary Le ChagrinEt La Pitie.
Also receiving a tribute is the celebrated Bengali director Buddhadev Dasgupta.
Retrospectives include grindhouse classics, a genre recently celebrated by Tarantino & Rodriguez;the late Canadian animation master Norman McLaren; and the avant-garde American independent director Nina Menkes (Phantom Love, Massaker).
Menkes will be on hand to introduce her films and will offer a Masterclass.
The festival which spreads infour downtown venues features 120 plus films and is mainly privately sponsored.
Backers include a number of businesses and publicbodiesincluding the French and the Goethe Institutes, the Japan Foundation, TV5, the E.U's Media Desk, the Greek Film Centre, the Municipality of Athens and the Ministries of Culture and Education.
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