The festival honors the memory and contribution of Thanasis Rentzis (Aigio, 1947-2025), a long-time friend of the Greek Film Archive and an auteur who laid the foundations of the Greek avant-garde, leaving behind a body of work that continues to provoke, inspire, and reshape the audience's perception of experimental cinema.
He was a director, theorist, teacher, founding member of the Center for Experimental Cinema, and publisher of the historic magazine FILM. His career included tenures in directorial positions at the Thessaloniki Film Festival and Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, while his intense union activity bears witness to his steadfast commitment to defending experimental and independent cinema.
His approach combined theory with practice, proposing a cinema where the image, sound, and light take on a primary role, transcending the boundaries of linear narrative and traditional cinematic forms. As he himself stressed in his manifesto (1975): “We need a new light on the screens. Let's create it”.
His first autobiographical fiction film, Black + White (1973), co-directed with Nikos Zervos, explores the existential crisis of a young artist in Athens during the junta. Beyond its anti-dictatoship undertones, the film touches on broader issues of the movements of the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola”. The emblematic experimental film Bio-graphy (1975) combines animation, expanded cinema, and simulated magic lantern projection to “bio-graph” the evolution of the industrial human, drawing from psychoanalytic motifs and critical theories of ideology.
In Fiction (1976-77), Rentzis experiments with abstract images, colors, and electronic music, celebrating light and creating a state of expanded consciousness, influenced by the psychedelic experiments of the 1950s-70s. The Electric Angel (1981) flirts with animation, live action, and archival material, archiving the transformations of sexuality in Euro-Mediterranean culture in a playful yet critical way. The documentary by Prokopis Daphnos , dedicated to his life and work, will also be screened.
In the words of the alchemist of images Thanasis Rentzis:
“In the beginning was chaos; awe follows; the body trembles; the gaze becomes fixed”.
