The festival honors Thanos Anastopoulos, who consistently serves a cinema rooted in humanism, social observation, and the moral responsibility of the filmmaker. As a director and producer, he moves effortlessly between fiction, documentary, and hybrid forms, seeking ways to connect human experience with history, memory, and the traumatic ruptures of society. As he has stated, “when public funding for culture decreases, the kind of cinema we make can become a form of resistance,” while noting that “a moral crisis often precedes an economic one”.
A central example of this ethical inquiry is Correction. Using a real incident of violence as its point of departure, Anastopoulos composes a rigorous, almost Bressonian drama about forgiveness, guilt, and the trauma permeating Greek society. The film examines with honesty the manifestations of racism and moral panic, illuminating human fragility within an environment of social prejudice, where the director’s human-centered gaze is expressed through the power of silence and the spareness of gesture.
In Daughter, he approaches the economic crisis from an essentially moral perspective, revealing the fissures of a society under strain. With tight storytelling and strong emotional intensity, Anastopoulos creates a social thriller in which moral collapse intersects with the violent coming-of-age of a child ‒ another act of deeply human-focused filmmaking.
A long-time resident of Trieste, in the observational documentary The Last Beach he allows time and people to unfold naturally. With a calm camera and an emphasis on detail, he explores borders, identities, and small social rituals. In Ghosts of the Revolution, a hybrid narrative moving between documentary and fiction, he attempts to recover the traces of the Enlightenment and of revolutionary ideas in contemporary Trieste. Humor, irony, and a poetic structure transform the film into a meditation on memory ‒ a memory that persists in haunting the present. Also screened is his first short film, The Viewer, a sharp commentary on political passivity.
