After a successful month of July and five Thursday screenings of contemporary Greek documentaries, as a part of the 16th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival Regional Events, the Greek Film Society of Sydney (GFSS) continues with its monthly screenings for the rest of the year.
The new July-December program will take off on August 21 with a special tribute to the late Thodoros Patrikareas, who lived and worked as a journalist in Sydney (1958-1973).
His 1963 play Throw Away Your Harmonica, Pepino is a landmark in Greek Australian theatre history. It was adapted in 1975 into a feature film Promised Woman and successfully staged again in English in 2000.
To mark the occasion, the GFSS is screening two films – the short documentary Helena of Sydney (1968) and the feature Promised Woman, both directed by Tom Cowan. Tom Cowan and Don Mamouney, the director of the revived stage production of 2000, will be guests on the night. A short excerpt of the
video of the play will also be screened.
On September 18, the documentary The Lost Signal of Democracy by Yorgos Avgeropoulos will be screened. This recent work documents the sudden closure of Greece’s 75-year-old public broadcaster in June last year and the struggle by its staff to keep the radio and television stations on air. It captures the pain and anger that the closure by government decree caused, and the deeper democratic issues that such public institutions represent in a time of crisis and privatisation.
On October 16, two short films – a fiction and a documentary – are paired together to offer an exploration of the lives of two women in rural settings. The fictional story is about a young woman intent on escaping from the controlling environment of her rural life, while the documentary presents a cross-cultural story of a Japanese woman who, having assimilated into Greek society, is drawn back into her painful past in a remote village of Japan.
The final screening on 27 November is Theo Angelopoulos’ 1986 The Beekeeper, the third in a series of films screened by the GFSS to honour the late director’s cinematic work.
The GFSS, now in its third year, continues to draw audiences, both Greek and non-Greek, to its screenings of a range of film genres and themes that provide the opportunity for informal discussion and exchange, while providing members with a stimulating program of films from old and new Greek cinema, as well as films that relate to Greek diasporic life.
All films have English subtitles and projection is in DVD format. Screenings are followed by discussion and films are introduced by members or special guest speakers. The society’s activities are conducted in both English and Greek.
Screenings take place at The Cyprus Community Club of NSW, 58-76 Stanmore Road, Stanmore. For further information on programs, visit www.greekfilmsocietysydney.com or contact 0450 155 194 or 0402 564 722