13/03/2012 - Greek crisis fallout takes up bulk of local entries, while Spanish and Egyptian uprisings add international flavor to the doc fest’s revolutionary cocktail

Greece’s ancient civilization can still serve up reasons for international interest, as proven by Mike Beckham’s UK documentary The World’s First Computer, screening today at the 14th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. The doc focuses on how the ancient Greeks built the first kind of personal computer more than two millennia ago, in the form of the Antikyther Mechanism and fascinating though it may be, it might have a hard time shining through the bulk of titles that focus on more recent affairs.

The fest’s opening title, Indignados [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tony Gatlif
film profile], was an obvious harbinger for what the programmers had in store for the rest of the festival. Based on Stéphane Hessel’s controversial pamphlet Time for Outrage, Tony Gatlif’s film chronicles last year’s public-space occupations that spread across Europe, America and the Arab world. Greece was one of the movement’s late adopters, but adopt it did, as Yorgos Pandeleakis depicts in 155 Sold, a first-person documentation of the events taking place during the long weekend of the Greek parliament’s first austerity measures vote.

Syntagma Square, Katerina Patroni’s addition to the Docville series of documentaries focusing on life in Greek cities today, takes a more knuckled-down look at the same subject, turning her camera towards a triplet of characters of the Athenian Occupy movement, while Christos Georgiou’s Children of the Riots aims to juxtapose the recent riots with those emerging after the shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos in December 2008, a story fictionalized last year in Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel’s Rotterdam opener Wasted Youth.

Interesting times have always made for interesting documentary subjects, and the country’s current social status is more than ripe for that type of analysis. Omiros Evangelinos’s Toxic Crisis tries to measure the degree of the state’s structural disintegration, Serafim Dousias’s Greece, I Am Facing Taxing Times! and Nikos Katsaounis and Nina Maria Paschalidou’s Krisis illustrate the economy’s effects on a more personal level, while local journalist and resident rock-star, Stelios Kouloglou, tries for a macroscopic view of the financial conspiracy theories that have lead international affairs to the point of turmoil with Oligarchy.