Nominated for this year’s Academy Award for best documentary feature, “Faces Places” by 89-year-old French New Wave pioneer Agnes Varda and French guerrilla “photograffeur” JR will open the 20th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (TDF), which begins on March 2.
Kathimerini newspaper comments that the film (its original title is “Visages, Villages”) follows the unlikely duo as they roam the French countryside in a van equipped with a photo booth and large-format printer, chatting with people and taking their pictures before plastering epic-size portraits on multiple surfaces including houses, barns, boulders and shipping containers. Their encounters with locals – factory workers, retired miners, waitresses and so on – generate charming musings about the ups and downs of the modern world.
The tribute to Varda’s cinematic legacy is only one of the treats prepared by organizers as the non-fiction event celebrates its 20th birthday.
Organizers have already unveiled some of this year’s highlights to be screened at the flagship Olympion and Pavlos Zannas cinemas on Aristotelous Square and the red-brick and steel complex on the docks.
They have also given carte blanche to American independent filmmaker Sara Driver, who gets to pick 11 films (10 documentaries and one fiction film). Meanwhile, the festival will screen her latest work, “Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” a profile of the poet, musician and graffiti prodigy in late-1970s New York.
Also, the festival will host a special section on the seismic events of 1968. Its organizers have scrambled together a rare selection of films that cast light on lesser-documented events, including the student demonstrations in Belgrade and Japan. It will be the first Greek screenings of the films.
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Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: Zweifüssler License: CC-BY-SA
Source: ekathimerini.com
