Local offerings at the 18th Thessaloniki doc fest

Angelique Kourounis’s latest documentary on Golden Dawn, Greece’s infamous neo-Nazi party, has an inevitable existential quality:

“My partner in life is a Jew, one of my sons is gay, another is an anarchist and I am a left-wing feminist as well as a daughter of immigrants. If Golden Dawn comes to power our only problem will be which wagon they will put us on,” Kourounis says in the press announcement for “Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair.”

Based on a series of interviews conducted over the course of five years, the director, a veteran news correspondent for Greece and the Balkans, sets out to decipher the motives and agendas behind GD supporters. She soon finds out it’s not a straightforward exercise.

“Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair” will be screened at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (TDF) starting March 11, as part of the Greek program, which this year features 72 feature and short films. Twenty-two of these productions have been included in the different sections of the International Program, while 50 are part of the Greek Panorama.

True to form, this year’s crop raises a wide range of critical subjects including politics, human rights, the environment, art, as well as intriguing human interest stories.

“Ludlow, Greek Americans in the Colorado Coal War” by director Leonidas Vardaros draws on interviews and archival material to document the role of about 500 Greeks, mostly Cretans, in the landmark labor uprising against coal mining companies in south Colorado between 1913-14. The confrontation culminated in a bloody clampdown in April 1914, known as the Ludlow Massacre, after the Colorado national guard raided a tent colony inhabited by more than 1,200 miners and their families, leaving an estimated 20 people dead.

In “The Longest Run,” director Marianna Economou follows two underage immigrants detained in a Greek jail pending trial on charges of illegal trafficking. With unparalleled access to the juvenile prison and courtroom, Economou exposes the cases of young people who are forced by criminal rings to smuggle undocumented migrants into Europe.

Other films in the Greek section include Haris Raftogiannis’s “True Blue,” which follows an elderly couple on Icaria, the idiosyncratic eastern Aegean island whose under-10,000 residents live famously long and healthful lives, and “Next Stop: Utopia,” by Apostolos Karakasis, about the efforts of a group of fired workers at a building materials factory in Thessaloniki to turn the closed-down business into a cooperative.

The festival, now in its 18th year, runs March 11-20, at Thessaoniki's port warehouse complex and the Olympion movie theater.

For more on the festival, log on to www.filmfestival.gr.