Athens 2007 – Panorama of European Cinema

Festival Poster

"Dry Season"

"Panorama of European Cinema" is the eldest film festival in Athens. It has been twenty years since the Greek daily newspaper "Eleftherotypia" first organized it. Presently, "Eleftherotypia" manages the festival with the assistance of our college Ninos Feneck Mikelides. It is the place where audiences have the opportunity to watch rare and interesting film retrospectives as well as recent European cinema.
    The festival took place in the middle of October with an excellent program. It presented retrospectives — of the films by Ken Loach, Monte Hellman and Orson Welles; "Make Love, Not War" — a collection of works by Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Michelangelo Antonioni and others; "Cult Movies" — Josef von Sternberg, Tod Browning, Donald J. Cammell, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino; "Avant Premiere" — the latest films from Ang Lee, Michael Verhoeven, Emir Kusturica and Cristian Mungiu.
   The festival hosted two honorary guests: Italian actress Valeria Golino and director Emir Kusturica who received a special trophy from the festival. The winner of the FIPRESCI prize was African film director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, for his recent film Dry Season (Daratt). (Salome Kikaleishvili)

FIPRESCI Prize: Dry Season (Daratt) by Mahamat Saleh Haroun. Details
— See Peter Krausz' review from the Adelaide Film Festival
Panorama of European Cinema, Athens, October 11-21, 2007, www.panoramafest.com

Reports

Unanswered Questions. Dry Season (Darrat) by Mahamat-Sakleh Haroun received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival 2007, and the FIPRESCI award at Athens. "Everything is dry here, dry and barren: The desert, the burning sun, and even human beings," writes Salome Kikaleishvili in her review. "There is hardly any dialogue; it seems like everything slowly creeps to the end. Landscapes, dialogues, emotion — everything is reduced to the bare minimum." More
Old Masters, New Stories. Dragan Jovićević finds the commons between The Relatives by István Szabó and One Hundred Nails by Ermanno Olmi. "Though these two films are entirely thematically different," he writes, "there is much to link them. Both Szabó and Olmi are showing us men coping with the contemporary world, deciding to resist their environments in an unusual way." More
Making Connections. Dimitri Kalantidis reviews Francesca Comencini's film Our Country and the films of two newcomers, Joachim Trier's Reprise, and Someone Else, Col Spector's first feature film. More

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