Thessaloniki Film Festival Opens With Minotaur

An opening built around Minotaur

The 67th Thessaloniki International Film Festival begins on November 5 with a screening of Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur. The festival runs through November 15. Its October 29 programme announcement names the film as the opener and sets May el-Toukhy's Woman Unknown for the closing night. The screening turns the previously announced programme into the first shared experience of this year's edition.

Minotaur is a pointed choice for the first screen to light up. Cannes awarded it the Grand Prix this year, and its official film page places a company director under pressure in Russia in 2022. A festival opener has to welcome an audience while announcing what kind of attention the next days will demand. This one does not sound like a ceremonial warm-up. It places personal crisis and a damaged political environment in the same frame. The festival's choice invites viewers to enter the wider programme ready for films that connect private life to public strain, rather than merely to celebrate a famous guest.

More than a single competition

Thessaloniki lists 258 films in its physical venues and 58 available through its online platform. It also has several international competition sections, Greek work and special programmes. A live news item already covered the Meet the Neighbors+ and Film Forward selections. The start of the full festival is broader: a schedule becomes a set of screenings, talks and encounters in the city.

The scale is useful only if audiences can find a path through it. A festival of hundreds of films is not experienced as one enormous list. Someone follows a director, a country, a question or a single strong opening night, then discovers a work nearby. Thessaloniki's combination of local and international programmes gives those paths room to cross. A Greek film can sit within the same visit as a title from a distant cinema tradition. The result is most valuable when the festival encourages that movement instead of leaving each section to serve only its established followers.

A desert across different screens

Director Oliver Laxe is guest curator of a major desert tribute. The festival says he selected 17 films and will give an open talk; an audiovisual installation and virtual-reality works also accompany the programme. Elsewhere, a Balkan Horror strand examines folklore, historical ghosts and genre cinema from the region. They offer two very different ways of exploring how place shapes fear and imagination.

The desert theme could easily become a collection of striking landscapes. Curating it across films and other media gives it a more demanding possibility: to ask how emptiness, distance and exposure change a story. A landscape can isolate a character, conceal a border or make a journey feel endless. Virtual work may alter the viewer's sense of scale in a way a cinema seat cannot. That does not make one form superior. It gives visitors a reason to compare how different forms use the same setting. Balkan Horror offers another route into place, this time through fears a region has told about itself. Both strands reward looking beyond the best-known titles.

The home city in the frame

The festival also honours Greek filmmaker Nikos Grammatikos with screenings spanning his work and a discussion with collaborators. Its Greek programme includes features and shorts, along with a restored screening of Maria Plyta's Eva. Thessaloniki announces accessible presentations of Grammatikos's Truants and Night Flowers. These choices put film history and the conditions of viewing beside the premieres.

That combination is an important part of what a festival can do. A new production may draw attention, but a restoration allows audiences to meet an older film under renewed conditions. Accessibility changes who can share that encounter; it is not just a footnote to a programme. A discussion with collaborators can also reveal how a film belongs to a working culture, not solely to the name on its poster. The larger point is concrete: celebrating cinema means caring about which works remain visible and which people can enter the room. Thessaloniki's home programme gives that principle a local shape.

Ten days to test the promise

The opening screening sets a tone that the following days can extend or challenge. The most interesting measure over the next ten days will be whether the programme's different routes actually meet: international competition, Greek filmmaking, historical work and themed discoveries. Minotaur begins that conversation with a film whose public and private pressures appear intertwined. The festival's wider value will emerge as viewers move from that high-profile start toward films they did not arrive planning to see. That is where a large programme becomes an experience rather than a number.