The Markaz Review:

Iason Athanasiadis

In Thessaloniki, cineastes pick their way through the cobbled lanes of what used to be Europe’s largest Jewish port, headed to minimalist screening auditoriums in converted warehouses. A city already used to year-round outdoor living glitters during a twice-annual film and documentary festival that is fast-becoming one of Europe’s best-known. But while packed restaurants and streetside cafés cascading to the illuminated Mediterranean corniche present an image of careless abundance, death and destruction unfurl on the sea’s furthest shore, in Gaza, and further south, in Sudan.

Three very different documentarians screened films in March in Thessaloniki, largely shot on cell phones from the site of smothered conflicts. Syrian director Mahmoud Atassi’s Eyes of Gaza follows three local journalists as they struggle to convey life under bombardment in the world’s largest open-air prison; Sudanese Talal Afifi’s Khartoum tells the story of five very different people finding themselves trapped in a capital city suddenly engulfed in civil war; and Lebanese-Canadian Amber Fares’ Coexistence My Ass follows a leftist Israeli comedienne, Noam Shuster Eliassi, as she negotiates the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israel’s culture wars alike, one quip at a time. Geographically, Thessaloniki was the closest location in which any of the films had been screened relative to their place of production. This points to both the sensitivity of the issues at stake and the festival’s emergence as a regional spot where difficult cultural and political conversations can be had.

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