The collaboration of the 14th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival with the German Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art and the Goethe-Institut brings to the fore a polyphony of contemporary and older films that engage with the themes of migration movements and memory. These two thematic axes ‒ core elements of modern European and global experience ‒ are explored through a prism that combines the political, the poetic, and the experimental.

The program includes historical perspectives that resonate in the present. In Passing – Drama by Angela Melitopoulos, the Asia Minor Catastrophe is linked to exile, migration to Germany, and collective oblivion through abstract montage. The perspective of labor migration continues in Money for Bread by Serap Berrakkarasu, which documents the working conditions of Turkish women in a German factory.

The contemporary refugee crisis is depicted in a direct and immediate way. Milad – My Planet... by Menelaos Karamaghiolis follows, over three years, an Afghan family trapped in Greece as they face moral dilemmas, while the filmmaker also documented refugees who occupied a square in Berlin. Spectres Are Haunting Europe by Maria Kourkouta and Niki Giannari poetically records the exclusion of refugees in the Idomeni camp, portraying them as political subjects. Τhe experimental documentary Now: End of Season by Ayman Nahle focuses on the liminal time experienced by Syrian refugees in Izmir.

At the same time, the program explores memory and identity. In From Aris to New York, Eva Stefani illuminates the lived experience and nostalgia of a migrant woman, while Vouvoula Skoura’s Inner Migration transforms a woman’s biography into a poetic reflection. In experimental form, Clarissa Thieme’s What Remains maps the remnants of war in Bosnia through silent landscapes, and Tamer El Said’s Borrowed A Family Album reconstructs his personal loss and mourning through found archival material of another family.