The Avant-Garde Film Festival is a proposal of the Greek Film Archive, an ongoing project over the last four years, aiming at creating a multilateral forum, which will be sensitising the audience on the diversity of cinema language, the many signs of the cinematic image and enhance the emergence of a new «cinephilia», in view of the moving of the Greek Film Archive in its new premisses at Lais in Kerameikos.

The Avant-Garde Film Festival focuses on the history of the avant-garde while reviewing its current tendencies: the European avant-gardes of '20s and '30s, the American underground, the British Avant-Garde, the Body Cinema, the Greek post-war experimental cinema, having been the concentric circles of past programs, still remain within our interest. Gender as represented in Women Cinema, a new problematic that galvanises modern trends in visual arts, cultural studies and humanities is also a topic of reference.

The Avant-Garde Film Festival aims at widening the horizons of the Greek audience, establishing a fora of discussions, icluding master classes, work shops, meetings and seminars, which will bring together and allow the conduct of a critical dialogue among young and veteran filmmakers, archivists, academics, students, art lovers and cinema lovers. Also developing a festival open to all kinds of cinematographic genres and media (fiction, documentary, experimental, new media) to enhance the interactive appreciation of new trends in multimedia art forms is within our scope.

Another goal is to reach wider audiences, to include foreign students and immigrants by focusing on subaltern cinema and opening programming to the geographical and cultural neighbourhood, especially the Balkans and Southeast Europe. Creating a festival network between the European and International Film Archives by providing a forum to screen the restoration and digitization projects of Film Archives is also planned.