#PANIGIRI
   Syllas Tzoumerkas

The event will be held in the city of Elefsina/Eleusis form the 21st to the 23rd of April. This innovative festival “interacts” with a religious, historical, and cultural institution such as the Feast Day of Saint George (patron saint of the city), incorporating new features into the collective consciousness with all-day and all-night film screenings, six hours of public talks and VR performances.

The core element of the fetsival will be the live filming in the public space with the aim of creating two films, in real time, that will be finalized with the participation of the audience, edited on site and screened at the end of the festival.

The project was developed by director Syllas Tzoumerkas and co-curated by academic and cultural practitioner Maria Chatzichristodoulou and film critic and programmer Lorenzo Esposito, in collaboration with the Thessaloniki Film Festival and LADA – The Live Art Development Agency (London).
 

For three days and two nights, in a pop-up cinema in the city which is specially designed, even for sleeping, 3,480 minutes of true real-time cinematic and new-media adrenaline await viewers – who might fall asleep during one movie and wake up during another. Among these films, Helena Wittman’s Human Flowers of Flesh will be screened for the first time in Greece from this year’s Locarno Film Festival, with Angeliki Papoulia and Denis Lavant, Matt Adams’ and Blast Theory’s two legendary interactive monoplanes in the films Bloodyminded and My One Demand respectively, the queer masterpiece LA Plays Itself (Fred Halsted, 1972) in a restored copy, the films of Argentinian director Eduardo Williams, Lav Diaz’s 10-hour epic The Evolution of a Filipino Family, as well as films incorporating real-time techniques by Wim Wenders, Michael Glawogger, Monika Willi, Ulrich Seidl, Alexis Damianos, Hanna Polack, JP Sniadecki, Stefan Jarl, Avo Kapraelian, and many more artists from around the world.
 

On Friday evening a 6-hour marathon of public speeches will be held at the historic West Attica Labour Union Building. It will begin a series of speeches and roundtables related to the festival’s themes (working class and live cinema) with the participation of distinguished speakers such as the artistic director of the Karlovy Vary Festival, Karel Och, the curator and creative director of Future Everything, Irini Papadimitriou, the artist, academic, and performer Niya B, the director and visual artist and founding member of Blast Theory, Matt Adams, the Italian media and Arabic studies scholar and co-founder of UntoldSyria, Donatella Della Ratta, the visual artist, academic and designer Chris Salter, and many more special guests.