Letter from Thessaloniki
Some of my best friends have been documentary makers. To say that these days seems either bold or sarcastic, given all the TV trash that is passed off as serious documentary. However, in the case of the late Roussos Koundouros, the assertion is simply true. While former US vice president Al Gore turned into a Oscar-winning environmental campaigner, Koundouros studied medicine but never practiced it. In his time – the 60s and 70s when documentary film was often conceived as a political weapon – he was acclaimed as one of the most prominent documentary makers in Europe. He has won a number of awards for his films, including a first prize in documentary at the renowned Cannes Film Festival for a scientific film on open-heart surgery. He has also served as the president of the Association of Scientific Cinematography and the head of the Greek Film Archives here. Sadly his biggest project – «In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great» – was never completed. Sponsored by UNESCO, this ambitious documentary foundered in the precipitous mountains of Afghanistan. It was the arrival of the military dictatorship that stopped this large-scale project. In the years of political strife – during the seven long junta years – Koundouros worked in Italy, France and Africa. I was lucky enough to collaborate with him on many documentaries. But paradoxically, Koundouros’s film work is relatively unknown in Greece. State and private TV officials attribute their own failure to remember him to his scientific subjects – something of a demerit in the land of negligence and improvised rashness. Already in its ninth year, the annual Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival has not yet found any time for recollections on Koundouros’s work. Not even in the section named «Portraits.» Inclusive and eclectic in its programming approach, the festival has chosen for its motto «Images from the 21st Century.» Once more (after the feature-film festival last November) and for a whole week, there will be cultural events, panel discussions, program sections (with such titles as «Stories to Tell,» «Views of the World,» «Focus on Asia» and tributes to «Dutch Docs»); there will also be award-winning journalist Jon Alpert and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple. Unhappily, Koundouros (he could be epitomized as Greece’s Robert Flaherty, considered the founding father of documentary films) is once more ignored. All the same, Thessaloniki – a vibrant university town with more than 60,000 students – creates with this documentary festival a unique community of artists and audiences. It must have seemed a good omen for this year’s festival when on Friday Kopple showed her documentary «Shut Up and Sing» – a film about the Texas trio, the Dixie Chicks, which has been blacklisted by country music radio for criticizing President Bush’s war in Iraq. Kopple – who will give a two-hour master class this morning at the John Cassavetes Theater – is widely known for her «non-involvement» approach to filmmaking. In the past, she has been noted for using her status as a filmmaker to scare off the leader of the strikebreakers in her documentary «Harlan County.» In other times and places, there have been documentary makers who favored direct involvement and even provocation when they considered it helpful. This sad method (usually called «taken from the raw») is, alas, practiced by most Greek filmmakers working for reality shows on our TV channels. Now, the films that I have selected to watch are: Constantinos Fykiris’s «Ascent to Lenin Peak,» which, despite its title, is not an ideologically colored documentary but a record of an attempt to climb the Pamir mountain range someplace in Central Asia. «Backstage: The Heroic Years» by Lakis Papastathis sounds interesting, as well, as does «Home – My Own Sierra Leone» by Pandora Mouriki. Being acquainted with the meticulous work done by journalist Stelios Kouloglou, «Confessions of an Economic Hit Man» sounds promising too. Drug rehabilitation programs for young students in «The Return» by Amalia Zepou got a check mark as well. So has «Delta: Oil’s Dirty Business» by Giorgos Avgeropoulos. Following recent euphoria over the pipeline deal between Greece, Bulgaria and Russia, our minds are not used to linking «dirty business» with oil. Documentary film is a very broad category of visual expression. It will be interesting to see over the next five days how international filmmakers will be presenting «Life as it Is» or «Life Surprised by the Camera,» «Life Filmed Surreptitiously» or whatever. There is a tribute to « Troubled Innocence» and one titled «Games We Play» (despite expectations, no sex in this section). The «Bad Boys of Summer,» by Loren Mendell and Tiller Russell, is a film about San Quentin inmates playing baseball. And as far as David Sutherland’s «Country Boys» goes, the film chronicles the coming of age of two adolescents in eastern Kentucky, one of the poorest parts of America. Newsreels may prove important in documentary film. Michael Verhoeven’s «The Unknown Soldier» challenges the established image of the «morally proper» Luftwaffe (German air force) during World War II. Underneath the sophisticated and often compelling visual rhetoric of a rather stylish festival, such as Thessaloniki’s, one can discover some real gems. In the eight sections of the 9th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival (including «Recordings of Memory,» «Habitat,» «Human Rights» and «Music») one is liable to notice a lot. But, as the ancient Greeks advised, everything in moderation.
