Free film screenings at festival in Attiko Woods

Free film screenings are bringing a bit of carefree entertainment into the lives of crisis-weary Athenians as the Regional Authority of Attica has organized a mini-festival to launch its newly renamed cinema.

Cine Attiko, in the Attiko Alsos woods in Galatsi, has been renamed Cine Attiko – Theodoros Angelopoulos Cinema, in honor of the award-winning Greek filmmaker who died in a road accident during a film shoot in January.

Following the official renaming ceremony last month, the festival will run from Tuesday through Sunday and feature one screening a night.

The theme is ?A Society in Crisis,? and kicks off with Herbert Biberman?s 1954 ?Salt of the Earth,? a neorealist drama about a 1951 zinc miners? strike in New Mexico that got its director, producer and writer blacklisted for their alleged political beliefs.

In ?La Haine? (Hate) from 1995, Mathieu Kassovitz observes a group of three young second-generation migrants who live in a housing project on the outskirts of Paris in the aftermath of a major riot. It is being screened tomorrow.

The following night?s screening is of ?Wasted Youth,? a 2011 Athens-set film co-directed by Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel, in which the life of an aimless teenager crosses that of a middle-aged policeman in the early days of the Greek economic crisis.

John Ford?s 1940 masterpiece ?The Grapes of Wrath,? which sees a family forced off its land in the Great Depression in an adaptation of the novel by John Steinbeck, is the screening slated for Friday.

On Saturday, Gregory Peck plays the ideologically driven lawyer of a small 1950s American town defending a black man on charges of rape against a white girl, in another adaptation of a novel, ?To Kill A Mockingbird? by Harper Lee.

The mini-festival wraps on Sunday with Jose Padilha?s 2007 directorial debut, ?Tropa de Elite? (Elite Squad), the story of a police captain assigned to clean up the slums of Rio de Janeiro prior to a visit by the pope.

Admission to all screenings is free of charge, while distribution of priority coupons will begin one hour prior to the 9 p.m. screenings.

The entrance to the Attiko Alsos woods, where the open-air Cine Attiko is located, is from Karpenissiou Street on the Galatsi ring road. For more information, call 210.699.7755.